


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON: 



% ^tubjr of ^radical Cfmstmmtg 

APPLIED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF WOOLLENS. 



BY 



EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D., 

Author of " Back to Back," " Workingmen's Homes," "In His 

Name," " Ten Times One is Ten," " The Man 

without a Country," Etc.. Etc. 






^< 







BOSTON: 
J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 

Office of "Lend a Hand" 
3 Hamilton Place. 



- 



1&2 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1888, by 

J. STILMAN SMITH & COMPANY, 
in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co. 



PREFACE 



The author supposes that this Essay on the 
Christian relations of the capitalist and the 
workman will be more generally read if it is 
presented in narrative form. 

It is proper to say that the details bearing 
on the business of manufacture have the au- 
thority of a well-known and successful manu- 
facturer of woollens. 

I am myself the person who was invited, 
in 1873, by the proprietors of three different 
woollen mills, to take them and carry them 
on on the plan proposed. I received these in- 
vitations because I had blocked out this plan, 
or rather a manufacturer of large experience 
had blocked it out for me, in a story which I 
published at that time in Harper's Magazine, 
called "Back to Back." 



IV PREFACE. 

Unfortunately for me, I was not trained to 
the woollen manufacture, and could not take, 
therefore, the difficult part which Mr. Spinner 
takes in this book, as Max Rising took it in 
that. I was therefore obliged to decline the 
three proposals. But in this book, as the 
reader will see, I have supposed that Mr. 
Spinner accepted one. 

EDWARD E. HALE. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. How they Lived at Hampton .... i 

II. The Plan 24 

III. The Results 32 

IV. The Store 58 

V. The Enterpriser 90 

VI. Children's Work 108 

VII. The School . . . 125 

VIII. Hours of Work 142 

IX. The Church 155 

X. The Public Library 175 

XI. Entertainment 183 

XII. Temperance 202 

XIII. The Savings Bank 211 

XIV. Work and Labor 232 

XV. Communism 250 

XVI. Conclusion 260 



HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

CHAPTER I. 

HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 

HAMPTON was a little factory town where 
was one woollen mill, which represented 
an investment of perhaps sixty thousand dol- 
lars. The village was pretty, — a little more 
four-square and set in its plan than I should 
have made it, — but with evident arrangements 
of comfort for the workingmen and working- 
women. Lines of maples, about twenty years 
old, or rather less, shaded the streets, growing 
perhaps a little too near the fronts of the 
houses. The houses were not in blocks. 
They were separate from each other, and each 
house had the command, if I may so speak, of 
as much as an acre of land, as a home garden. 
I noticed, as I walked about the village and 
pushed my explorations into the back streets, 
that, in many instances, the lots connected with 
back lots, so that these gardens were consider- 



2 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ably more than an acre. The mill was just off 
the village street, built close to the Beaver 
Brook, which was dammed up to make the 
waterfall which provided power. A church, a 
town hall, and a schoolhouse faced three sides 
of a little public square, which was planted with 
trees and flowers, in the midst of which there 
was a fountain. I noticed a stand for a band 
on one side of the square. 

I had been following Beaver Brook, and what 
the geography would call its tributaries, far up 
into the woods and hills, and had returned to a 
late dinner, with a basket of trout quite as 
heavy as I cared to carry. The plan had been 
that we were to drive down the valley after din- 
ner, and see what was to be seen of a certain 
mound in the fork of the river and brook, which 
either was or was not built by the Aztecs, or by 
Chippewas, or some other Indian tribes, and re- 
garding which we were to form an opinion 
while we spent a pleasant afternoon. But the 
appearance in the west of black clouds, which 
made a thunder storm certain, broke up these 
plans for a drive, and so I found myself sitting 
with Mr. Spinner, my host, on the broad east- 
ern piazza, with the chance for a long talk, 
which business, amusement, or the interruption 
of guests had not permitted during my visit. 

"Now you can tell me," said I, "how you 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 3 

came here, what you did first, and what you did 
last, why you did it, and where you did it, when 
you failed, and when you succeeded. " 

Spinner laughed. "I am. not a story-teller," 
said he, " and I shall be apt to put the cart be- 
fore the horse. The story will fail in what the 
magazines call artistic or aesthetic grouping or 
arrangement. But if you put me on my hobby, 
I shall ride him, and you will have to see his 
paces." 

I said I wanted nothing better. 

" I like to tell the story," he said. " I have 
seen it all, — I and Nancy here, — and we have 
been a good deal of it. But we should not 
have done what we have, nor would you see 
what you see here, but for the loyal help of 
the people here ; no, nor if, on the whole, the 
country had not been behind us. At bottom, 
John, this is a country of workingmen. The 
wealth in the hands of a few rich men is easily 
seen and easily talked of. But, for all that, 
the amount in the pockets of the People — the 
People with a large P, as that man said in his 
speech — is vastly more than the amount at 
the bank accounts of a few nabobs. Indeed, I 
often think of that phrase of Quincy's, that the 
servant-girls of Boston owned the palaces on 
their Back Bay. He meant that the servant- 
girls made the deposits in the savings banks, 



4 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

which enabled them to lend to the palace-build- 
ers all the money they wanted. 

"So the country sympathizes with industry, 
with contrivance, with work. That sympathy 
shows itself in law, — well in fashion, though 
the newspapers do not think so, — in public 
sentiment. And this makes, oh, Freeman, it 
makes no end of difference. I would not run 
a mill in Mexico, — not if you would give me 
forty-five ingots of silver to build into the foun- 
dation. Nay ; when I remember how I heard 
a Manchester woman from England once, in a 
New Hampshire valley, hold up her hands to 
heaven and invoke its ' curse on them that built 
the chimbleys which shut out God's light,' from 
her old home, in the England she had deserted ; 
when I heard that, I was glad I was not making 
cloth in England. I like to work where I have 
'the country behind me.' " 

Then Spinner asked me if I remembered 
where we had heard that phrase. I did remem- 
ber it very well. Captain Greely had given an 
account, intensely exciting, of his Arctic ad- 
ventures. And he told us how he encouraged 
the men by telling them that they had "the 
country behind them." 

"Well," said Spinner, as he picked up the 
thread of his history, and as little Mary Spinner 
brought me a Bartlett pear and a fruit-knife, 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 5 

"to begin at the beginning, we began when 
everything was horribly depressed. I suppose 
that is a good time to begin. If the sand and 
gravel has been swept off the rock, you have a 
clean underpinning. You can build on the rock, 
and no mistake, and for that there is good Scrip- 
ture. It was in the autumn of 1874. I had been 
the foreman in the dyeing-room — head-dyer I 
was called — in the Andalusia Mills, at Groton. 
Perhaps you remember how high up they went," 
he said, rather grimly, " higher than a kite. 
The selling agent knew as much about wool as 
I know about quaternions. He chose to buy 
our wool, as well as to sell our goods. He left 
the business mostly to his sons, who knew more 
of billiards than I know of teazles. And the 
upshot of it all was that there was that first- 
rate smash-up. Stockholders and all were mad. 
Andalusia Mills were sold under the hammer to 
some Germans, and they brought in their own 
people to run them, if and when they opened 
again. So I and Nancy here, with our two 
babies, were left out in the cold. 

" Meanwhile the country was drugged or 
flooded, or whatever you call it, with every 
sort of woollen goods. And it did seem as if 
the man was a fool who made any more. 

"Just at that time I met at some sort of 
a committee meeting our old friend Thankful 



6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Nourse ; we were both trustees of a working- 
man's building fund. I walked home with 
Nourse, and, well, yes, I told him a few bottom 
truths on the subject of investment. He had 
been in the Andalusia, and now had the pleas- 
ure of seeing the same stock quoted at '35, no 
buyers,' for which his father had given two or 
three hundred a share. 

"I told Nourse that it was just what the 
Scripture said. He had had his good things, 
and now he had his evil things. I told him 
that if he had known how to manufacture 
woollens, and had chosen to use his knowl- 
edge, he would have saved much of his invest- 
ment. 

"'Instead of which,' I said, 'you chose to go 
to the Islands of Greece, and up the Nile, and 
across the desert to Damascus, and you left 
the business of manufacturing to some people 
who knew nothing about it.' Nourse answered, 
rather grimly and gloomily, that he knew that 
very well, quite as well as I did, and that he did 
not come to have his memory refreshed. 

"'No,' I said, 'I did not mean to annoy you. 
But I meant to say this, that there are two dif- 
ferent rates by which capital ought to be paid. 
One is the rate by which I am paid for my 
money when I do not take care of it, and take 
no risks. This is a much lower rate than the 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. J 

rate to be paid me when I take care of it my- 
self, and when I do take some risk.' 

" ' Of course,' Nourse says ; ' every one agrees 
to that.' 

" Yes, every one agrees to that. But I have 
not found that all people agree to what follows. 
Yet I think it is clear. It is not very hard, in 
any country, to find out about what capital is 
worth (say) for idiots or fools of any sort, or for 
people who do not want to take care of their 
money, if they knew how. It is clear enough 
that the long government loans, such loans as 
the English consols, represent the minimum 
rate of interest. An idiot or his guardian 
would be sure of his interest. He takes no 
care of the investment, but his investment is 
sure. And I went on to say that while Nourse 
was going up the Nile, or was crossing the des- 
ert, or even if he had a paralytic stroke which 
lasted seventeen years, the Andalusia people 
ought to have paid him at that rate of interest, 
and that he had, indeed, in equity, an absolute 
right to it. 

"Nourse began to see what I was driving at ; 
and he said that if that were all capitalists 
were to have, nobody would ever bother to use 
money for manufacturing. They would try gov- 
ernment bonds and be done with it. 'And you 
fellows,' said he, ' who are now very willing to 



8 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

take our subscriptions to your stock, would find 
there was no money to build the mills with, or 
to buy the first bale of wool.' 

" I said I knew that ; and that I did not mean 
to limit them to that. But I said, that for what 
followed this minimum rate, they became, to a 
certain extent, adventurers. What followed was 
something like a second-mortgage bond, — not 
so sure in its essence as the first. ' You are 
entitled,' I said, ' to what we will call the Idiot 
Rate, — the average rate of " Governments," 
— though the sky should fall, in bad times or 
good times. But for after profit, you must take 
the chances, just as the retailer does, who sells 
you satinets and broadcloths, — or just as the 
tailor does, who has pieces of them on his 
shelves, and cannot sell them. When the An- 
dalusia people paid you that swamping dividend 
of eleven per cent, six or eight years ago, three 
per cent or a little more came to you because 
it was the worth of the money, and nearly 
eight per cent came to you because that was 
a good year, and because then you had some 
intelligent people at the fore.' 

"Nourse growled that it was long since he 
had had any such good fortune, — that he was 
a fool not to sell out then, and that he never, he 
hoped, should be such a fool again. 

" But I went to see him, the next day, and we 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 9 

followed up the conversation. I told him, that 
even in the depressed condition of affairs which 
we were in, there were as good chances as ever 
for going into the business of making woollen 
cloths. I said that I did not believe that wear- 
ing warm clothes in winter was going out of 
fashion. 

" Nourse said that the tariff might change, 
and England and Germany might undersell us. 
He had burned his fingers once, and he would 
not burn them again, — and so on and so on. 

" As for tariffs, I said that the country would 
long want a large revenue, and was used to 
gathering it by import duties. I said that the 
country was really governed by its workingmen, 
and that they would be slow to injure them- 
selves. And I said that whether there was a 
high tariff or not, we are an ingenious people, 
and a numerous people ; that the nearer the 
mill was to the shop on the one side, and to 
the man who made the coat on the other, the 
better was the chance of the man who carried 
on the mill. Any way, I said, I had been edu- 
cated to make woollen cloth, that was my pro- 
fession, and I did not expect to give it up ; that 
there were hundreds of thousands of Americans 
as good as I, who had been trained to that pro- 
fession, and that we had somewhere between 
forty and fifty million people about us who 



IO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

were glad to wear the cloth we had made. He 
laughed good-naturedly, and said he was glad I 
was in such good heart. And I reminded him, 
that however much he had suffered by the An- 
dalusia, I had suffered more. 

"But, indeed, those were black times in our 
business. O ! I cannot tell you how many mills 
shut down, — all the weak ones, — most of the 
little ones, — and indeed a good many which no 
one would ever have called weak until then. It 
happened that I wrote an article about manu- 
facturing, in a weekly paper, which attracted the 
attention of some business men, and from that 
article it was that I received, through the edi- 
tor's hands, three letters, from three different 
sets of people, asking me if I did not want to 
bring to life three different broken-winded wool- 
len mills, in three different parts of the country. 
One of them was in Ohio ; one of them was in 
Middlesex, in Massachusetts ; and the third was 
a mill here in Hampton. I do not say it was 
this mill, though here is the old sluice-way, the 
old wheel in fact, and in part the old founda- 
tion. But, really, we have changed almost every- 
thing, and the village, as you see it, is practi- 
cally new. 

" If I do not tire you, or bore you, I will tell 
you how it came about." 

I said it would not bore me at all ; that, in 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. II 

fact, I had come to Hampton to find out, if I 
could, the secret of their success, and that the 
more he liked to tell me, the better I should be 
pleased. So Spinner began again. 

"I do not pretend that I should have launched 
out into this, if the Andalusia had held on. I 
had a good salary there, and it was very con- 
venient and very pleasant to draw my pay with 
the rest, to salt down what I wanted, and to let 
a strong company behind me take all the risks 
of the business. I have never wondered that 
men are so eager to go into positions where 
they have fixed pay, regularly paid. But the 
Andalusia had not held on. It had been blown 
up 'higher than a kite.' I had Nancy and the 
babies in a world which was full of Thankful 
Nourses ; I mean, full of men who were afraid 
of manf uacturing, — that is, were afraid of the 
very enterprises on which my bread and butter 
and my babies' milk and spoons depended. That 
was really the reason why, when the third of 
these mills was offered me, I began to ask my- 
self whether I had not better face the music ; in 
fact, whether I must not face the music. The 
Ohio letter I had answered right away, with a 
civil refusal. But the Middlesex letter and this 
Hampton letter came together, by one mail. 
That interested me, and made me think some- 
thing might be done, and I sent for John 



12 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Workman, and asked him to come and see 
me. 

"No. He is not one of the Worcester Work- 
mans. That is another family. His father came 
from Maine, and afterwards went to Wisconsin. 

" I sent for John Workman, and he came to 
me. He was out of work, as I knew he was, and 
I knew that he would know some of the best 
hands we had had at the Andalusia. The de- 
pression of all business was as hard for them as 
it was for the manufacturers. Well, I had much 
the same talk with him that I had had with Mr. 
Nourse, only now I began, so to speak, at the 
other end. But I told Workman that he and I 
had our chance now. We had often said that 
the rate of wages ought to rise with good times, 
if it was to fall with bad times. But I had three 
mills offered to me to carry on, and thought I 
was not without hopes that I could persuade 
Nourse to give some sinews of war. So I said 
to Workman that if he could get a lot of men 
together who were willing to work at minimum 
wages, but to be so far partners in the concern 
that if times improved their wages should im- 
prove, we had our chance. I told him that the 
' bloated capitalists ' were, for once, as badly off 
as the men who worked with their brains and 
with their hands, and that for once we had a 
chance to begin in our own way. 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1 3 

" Now, as I said before, in ordinary times, and 
especially in prosperous times, this would have 
been mere talk, and nothing more. But Work- 
man had nothing to do, and he had a family to 
feed. He knew several of our best friends, as 
I have said; and they had nothing to do, and 
they had their families to feed. He brought 
two or three of them to me, and we had long 
conversations. It ended in my getting more 
promises from them, which I was able to carry 
to Mr. Nourse. They were willing to take hold 
with me ; I did not say on shares exactly, but 
really it was much the same way that the fisher- 
men, or in old days the whalers at Nantucket, 
go, or went, for their enterprises. That is to 
say, everybody there was to be sure of his ra- 
tions as far as anything could be sure ; but for 
the rest, it all depended upon whether our voy- 
age were a good one or not. The men wanted 
to divide every three months, but I would not 
agree to this. I said the voyage must last two 
years before there was a division. They were 
rather a superior class of men, — they were in- 
terested in the plan. They were all running 
behindhand, and drawing on their bank ac- 
counts ; and they finally agreed that our voy- 
age should be a two years' voyage before we 
made any dividend. That is to say, they agreed 
to just what Nourse agreed to. All that was 



14 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

to be absolutely promised was a ' starvation pay- 
ment,' and the rest was to be part of the ven- 
ture. 

" Let me say, by the way, that in any such 
enterprise you are able to rely on the love of 
adventure which exists in all men's hearts. 
Why, Freeman, if you thought it was right, 
you would like to buy a lottery ticket yourself 
to-day, and you are really sorry that you know 
it is wrong. 

" As for me, I was between the two, with 
Workman. We were a sort of buffers, to take 
all the pounding. We were to be scolded by 
both sides, and have all the responsibility of 
everybody's failures. We were to be responsi- 
ble with the present owners of the mill, which- 
ever way we should take. We were to make 
the engagement with Nourse, and the engage- 
ments with the men. When we were fairly 
running, if ever we were fairly running, I was 
to buy the wool, and I was to sell the cloth. I 
was to make the journeys to New York, and I 
was to have money enough in the strong-box 
every Saturday night to pay the starvation 
wages we had agreed upon, and at the end of 
every third month to pay Nourse the ' idiot 
dividend ' on his capital. Workman was to . 
take the personal oversight of the manufacture, 
to turn the raw wool into woollen. That is to 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1 5 

say, we were to be these hated middle-men 
whom we had abused so often, and whom we 
had heard cursed so often. I did not much like 
to be a middle-man ; but it was very clear that 
Nourse did not mean to run this mill, but was 
going off to the Sandwich Islands. And the 
people who owned it did not mean to run it. 
If they had meant to, they would not have of- 
fered it to me. 

" I showed the men's agreement to Nourse, 
and I got a half-way promise from him that, if 
I started such a plan, he might put in some 
money. How much he would put in, I did not 
know. But on the strength of his promise I 
drew fifty dollars out of my bank account, and 
took Workman with me, and we came down to 
see this place. I can tell you that it did not 
look much as it does now. It had been badly 
planned, badly managed, and had come to grief. 
A poor broken-winded mill at the best ; and 
when we saw it, it had no wind at all. The 
people had all gone away except an old man 
who was keeper, and who had his machinery, 
such as it was, clean and in good order. But 
it would evidently take a good deal of money, 
and I no longer wondered that the people had 
written to me to offer it to me. 

"If you care anything about it, I will show 
you to-morrow the papers that passed between 



l6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

me and them, and I should like to show you 
some photographs which show what it was 
when we took hold. 

"But, to make a long story short, for Nancy 
wants us at tea, it ended in my persuading 
Nourse to buy the whole concern, and for the 
present to hold the deed. But he took me as 
partner, and John Workman as another partner ; 
and we drew out our bank accounts, — I had 
nearly two thousand dollars then, and Workman 
had five or six hundred, — so that we might be 
with him in good faith partners in co-operation. 
And it was agreed that any man who worked in 
the mill three months might become a stock- 
holder with us. Indeed, Nourse agreed to sell 
out all his stock if we chose. We were to allow 
him four per cent a year, as what we all called 
in joke the 'idiot's dividend,' which was to be 
paid as our first charge after we had paid what 
we called ' starvation wages ' and our other run- 
ning expenses. 

" For the rest, I was to be permitted, for my 
salary as manager, to draw six hundred dollars 
a year, as the men drew their wages. Work- 
man was to draw the same. After the end of 
the second year we were to see where we were. 
That is to say, the first voyage should then be 
considered over. Profits, for we took it for 
granted there would be profits, were then to be 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. I J 

divided into three equal parts. Nourse was to 
have one-third ; Workman and I, as managers, 
were to have one-third ; and the men were to 
have one-third. Of course, as fast as they 
bought out Nourse's stock, they also became 
capitalists, and took their earnings as such. 
The scheme would work, however, if none of 
them took any of his share. 

" However, you had better see all this on 
paper, and I will show you the articles of agree- 
ment after Nancy has given you a cup of tea. 

" When the papers were finally passed I had 
Workman with me, and he brought with him 
one of the best of the men who had agreed to 
try the new plan at Hampton, whose name was 
Holmes. We had gone all over the business 
pretty carefully, and I thought Mr. Nourse 
wanted to get away. But the other two still 
lingered, and finally Holmes broke the silence, 
and said : — 

" ' I wanted to say to you, Mr. Nourse, and I 
think Mr. Spinner would like to say the same 
thing, that we are not going into this thing as 
a mere matter of business. It is a matter of 
business, and we will hold to our promise as 
men of business. But we like the plan really, 
and we like it because it seems to us to be fair 
all round. There is a great deal of bad talk — 
you must excuse me if I say I think it is on all 



1 8 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

sides — about the relations of what people call 
labor and capital. For myself, I never called 
myself a laborer; I always called myself a 
workman, and I think there is a difference be- 
tween work and labor. But that is neither 
here nor there. I, for one, do not want to en- 
courage hard language between men like you, 
Mr. Nourse, who have money, and men like me, 
who want to do an honest day's work, who ex- 
pect to be paid for it, but who do not expect 
anything more than our pay. I should think 
that, if you will let me say so, was the Chris- 
tian way of stating this thing, and though I do 
not make much pretence as a religious man, I 
am a member of the church, and I do want to 
go forward in my everyday work, as I do in 
what I say on Sunday, on Christian principles. 
Now, if you do not think I am talking too long, 
— and my wife often tells me that I do talk too 
much, — I should like to explain what I mean 
by Christian principle.' 

" Mr. Nourse said, with a great deal of feel- 
ing, that he was very much obliged to him ; 
that he would stay all night to hear what he 
had to say. For he said he had made this 
thing a matter of prayer himself, and he wanted 
to know, if he could, what were the Christian 
relations which bound him to the men at work 
in the establishments where he had any inter- 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1 9 

est. He said, very earnestly, that anybody was 
unjust to him who said he merely wanted to 
screw out of his money the most that could be 
got for it ; that he had read and talked and 
studied, in hope of finding out what these same 
Christian relations were. He would be very 
much obliged to Mr. Holmes if he would take 
all the time he wanted to state his view about 
it. 

" Holmes seemed somewhat encouraged by 
this declaration, but he said, with a half laugh, 
that we should not want to stay till midnight. 
1 Indeed, it is all in very short language in the 
New Testament, where it says we must bear 
each other's burdens. It says that no man is 
to live for himself alone, and no man is to die 
for himself alone. For my part, I do not think 
I should work a day if I were not pleased with 
the thought that I was doing my share to clothe 
a man who cannot clothe himself as well as I 
can clothe him, — some poor fellow off in Da- 
kota or catching whales in the Arctic Seas, 
maybe,' he said, laughing. * I want to do my 
share in the work of this world. It happens 
that I have been trained to do this as a weaver. 
I call myself a good weaver, and I think I am 
able to- teach other people something about 
weaving. If I did not think so I should go 
about something else ; I would not come with 



20 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Workman to this mill. But I want to do this 
as a disciple of Jesus Christ and a child of God. 
I want to do it in such a way that I shall not be 
ashamed of doing it when I come to die. 

" ' Now, Mr. Nourse and Mr. Spinner both,' 
he said, ' this plan of yours is somewhat new in 
the way in which you have set it up. It really 
implies, as far as I can see, all that I have ever 
contended for when I have made speeches, as I 
have often done, in our trade-union meetings. 
If you will let me say so, this plan, as Mr. 
Spinner has drawn it up, throws our business of 
manufacturing on very much the same ground 
on which most business is done in America. 
Men are used to such a union as I make, and 
as Workman makes, with Mr. Spinner and any- 
body he has with him to carry on this mill. 
Men know perfectly well that there must be a 
director or manager ; there must be somebody 
to make plans and somebody to carry out plans ; 
and we are not such fools as to suppose that 
that somebody is to work without being paid 
for it. I am not such a fool as to suppose that 
he will know how to do his work without learn- 
ing how. We are not, therefore, jealous at all 
of the man who directs our industry, who man- 
ages the concern, who says what is profitable 
and what is not profitable, and who buys and 
sells our goods. If you will think of it, that is 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 21 

exactly what is done in every wholesale store or 
retail shop. There is a man who buys my gro- 
ceries, for instance ; he knows where to buy 
them and how to buy them cheaply, and, al- 
though he sells them to me for half as much 
again as he gave for them, I do not quarrel 
with him. It is a convenience for me to buy a 
pound of sugar instead of buying a barrel of 
sugar, and I do not quarrel with the man who 
gives me that convenience. But, behind the 
grocer, there is a bank, which lends him money 
and provides him with the capital which he is 
going to use. Now here, Mr. Nourse, I am not 
sure that you would agree with me, but I am 
telling you the average opinion of American 
workmen about the relationship of that bank to 
that grocer. They say that the bank provides 
him with capital at certain rates, which do not 
vary very much from time to time. There was 
once a time when they were even fixed by law 
at six per cent, or thereabouts. No one says 
that was wise, and I suppose it was not wise. 
Still, this is certain : those rates do not go up 
and down in exact correspondence with the ups 
and downs of business. When my grocer has 
very little custom he does not find that the 
banks lend him money any more readily be- 
cause he wants it more. In fact, he does not 
tell the bank very accurately what the state of 



22 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

his business is ; they do not ask him very care- 
fully. They are careful to know if his credit is 
good, — that he does not press them too hard, 
— and if he is safe they lend him money. 

" ' I say that is the relationship in which people 
are in the habit of using capital in America. 
That is exactly the relationship which you have 
established with us in this contract you have 
made. Please to observe, then, that it is the 
arrangement which we are used to. It is the 
arrangement which we see succeeds in other 
forms of business. That is the reason why we 
like it better than an arrangement in which, if 
business happened to be very prosperous, if 
sales were very quick, and our goods particu- 
larly in demand, the capitalist should make the 
usual profit on that account, while our wages 
would rise but slowly, if they rose at all. 

" ' I think Mr. Spinner said that we are not 
above liking the excitement of good times, and 
we are men enough to take the pressure of bad 
times. Here is the reason why we are willing 
to share and share. 

"'Beyond that, I should like to assure you, 
Mr. Nourse, who seem to represent capital in 
this conversation, and you, Mr. Spinner, who 
seem to represent skill in manufacturing and in 
trade, — I should like to assure you both that 
we shall like this plan, not simply because we 



HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 23 

think we are going to have more money in our 
pockets at the end of two years, but because it 
seems to us exactly fair. It seems to us that 
now we bear your burdens, and, if you will let 
me say so, that you bear ours. When I go to 
church, I am apt to hear a good deal of this 
talked about. And I find that I am very apt to 
get thinking that this is the practical side of the 
Christian religion ; and if we can only succeed 
here on our part, and you on your part, in keep- 
ing this in mind, why, we shall be working out 
the Christian relations of capital to workmen. 
It will not be a great while, as it seems to me, 
before we cease talking about your part and our 
part, and shall feel that we are all engaged in 
one concern. This I can assure you of, — that 
under such a plan as this, you are certain to 
have picked workmen and workwomen. I do 
not know how much you have thought of it, but 
it is a great thing to have a contented set of 
people. It is not a bad thing to have a set of 
men who know they are trying an experiment, 
and I can promise you that while there is any 
hope that this experiment will succeed, the work- 
men, whom I do not choose to call laborers, will 
meet you gentlemen half way, as you have met 
us.'" 

Such were Mr. Holmes's views as to the 
"Christian relations between capital and labor." 



CHAPTER II. 

THE PLAN. 

n^HE arrangements by which the Hampton 
Mills were set running were, indeed, sub- 
stantially those on which they have been run 
from that day to this day. An act of incorpora- 
tion was taken out, on the principle of limited 
liability, under the general corporation law of 
that state. This act originated, as all similar 
legislation in the world originated, in the act 
framed by Mr. Theodore Hinsdale in Connecti- 
cut, in the year 1837. It was an act and he a 
man to be celebrated and honored by all who 
believe in Christian Co-operation, and think that 
the law should sustain and protect all who wish 
to bear each other's burdens. 

I will not print the act of incorporation here ; 
for I shall make the plan more intelligible by 
copying the original agreement, as it was drawn 
up by Nourse, Spinner and Workman. Event- 
ually, Spinner and Workman printed this agree- 
ment, and kept copies of it in the office, to give 
away to people like me, who came to see the 
operation of the mills. 



THE PLAN. 25 

Hampton Woollen Mill. 

Thankful Nourse of Arcadia, John Workman 
of Hopedale, and William Spinner of Crastis 
agree to form a corporation for the re-establish- 
ment of the Hampton Woollen Mills in the 
town of Hampton. This agreement is to last 
for five years, and afterwards, until one of these 
three parties expresses a wish to withdraw, when 
the partnership shall be dissolved, and the cor- 
poration, at the end of one year's notice given 
by the dissatisfied partner. 

[In fact, neither of them wished to withdraw 
at the end of five years. And a private agree- 
ment by which they were bound to each other 
to consent to such withdrawal was, at the end 
of five years, cancelled by the three. Either of 
them now has the right to sell his stock, and on 
the death of either of the managing partners, 
the surviving shareholders would choose his 
successor.] 

1. Thankful Nourse, for himself, his heirs 
and representatives, agrees to furnish as re- 
quired seventy-two thousand' five hundred dol- 
lars for the purchase and repairs of the property 
known as the Hampton Mills, and for carrying 
on the manufacture of woollen cloth under the 
management of the said Workman and Spinner, 
already named. 



26 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

2. John Workman of the second part agrees 
to furnish five hundred dollars for the same pur- 
pose. 

3. William Spinner of the third part agrees 
to furnish two thousand dollars for the same 
purpose. 

The sum of seventy-five thousand dollars thus 
contributed is to be the capital stock of the en- 
terprise, and when capital is spoken of in this 
agreement, the sum now named, of seventy-five 
thousand dollars, is meant. 

John Workman and William Spinner, of the 
second and third part of this agreement, agree 
to give all their time and skill to the manufac- 
ture of woollen goods at the said Hampton Mills ; 
— they are to choose the workmen and appoint 
the foremen, and direct the manufacture. They 
are to buy the wool and other necessary mate- 
rial; they are to sell the manufactured goods for 
the best advantage of the concern. Acting as 
the firm of " Spinner & Workman," they are 
to have the control of the mill as entirely as if 
they had leased it from the corporation. They 
do this for the benefit of all parties concerned, 
as is hereinafter described. 

It is understood and covenanted that the mill 
is to be carried on with the intention that the 
profits are to be divided between the owners, 
the two managers, and the workmen employed 



THE PLAN. 27 

by them ; — that one-third of the profits shall be 
paid to the owners, one-third to managers, and 
one-third to workmen. 

In the estimate of profits for such division, it 
is agreed that there shall have been first paid as 
necessary expenses, — 

1. Four per cent on the sum of $75,000 to 
the owners. 

2. Six hundred dollars a year to each manager. 

3. To each workman as may be agreed with 
him, but on a scale of wages intended to repre- 
sent three-fourths of the current rate of wages 
in his line. 

4. If the mills do not earn four per cent, 
after paying the other expenses, the owners 
shall receive only the amount which it does 
earn. 

It is further agreed between the said Thank- 
ful Nourse of the first part and the said Spinner 
and Workman of the second and third parts of 
this agreement, that, for the needs of the mill 
in carrying forward this enterprise, if said Spin- 
ner and Workman find it necessary to give their 
notes for discount at any time, the said Thank- 
ful Nourse, or his agents for him, will indorse 
those notes to the amount of thirty thousand 
dollars and no more. And the said Spinner 
and Workman shall have no power to contract 
other debts chargeable to the corporation, except 



28 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

for advances on goods manufactured. The ac- 
counts of the firm and of the corporation shall 
be accurately kept, and at all times open to ex- 
amination by either of these parties or by any 
stockholder, or any person commissioned by 
one-third of the workmen in the mill, who are 
to be regarded as having the rights of partners 
in the concern. 

A balance-sheet shall be prepared at the end 
of every half-year to show the profit or loss of 
the mills in the last six months. 

If any balance of profit appears, after the ex- 
penses above provided for have been met, the 
owners representing capital as above described 
shall receive two per cent semi-annually on their 
stock invested. 

The remaining profits shall be credited in 
three equal portions but shall not be drawn for 
division till the end of two years. 

One-third shall be paid to capital as above 
described. 

One-third shall be paid to the managers. 

One-third shall be paid to the workmen, — to 
be divided in the proportion of the wages which 
they have already received. In the event of the 
death of any workman, or of his leaving the 
mill, his representative in Hampton shall re- 
ceive his share of the profits, as if he remained 
in the employ of the corporation. 



THE PLAN. 29 

At the end of five years the mills shall be 
sold for the benefit of all concerned, and the 
profit, if any, shall be divided among all con- 
cerned, on the same basis as that described for 
the division of the semi-annual profits. 

[At the end of five years the enterprise was 
so successful that this part of the agreement 
was cancelled by all concerned.] 

The part of the transaction which Spinner 
knew was difficult, and which Nourse thought 
was impossible, was the persuading a sufficient 
number of workmen to take hold on such terms 
as those described. But John Workman had 
always, after he had once 'enlisted, felt sure 
that that part could be brought about. He 
belonged, in particular, to a workingmen's club 
which had often discussed such subjects. The 
men were good fellows who did not believe that 
"the other fellow" in a bargain was to have 
nothing. They had loyally tried to work out 
the question of wages on the same plan which 
should not involve "knocking down and drag- 
ging out." Here was a plan with money 
behind it. On the other hand there was noth- 
ing. The Andalusia, where most of them had 
worked, was bankrupt. Men were really trudg- 
ing about on foot, seeking chances as weavers 
and dyers, and there were no such chances. 

What was offered was almost starvation wages, 



30 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

but there was no sham about it. And every 
man was sure of a chance for success. Every 
man was compelled to invest for two years the 
remaining quarter of his income, which was not 
paid him. 

Workman was able to offer his tenement 
houses at fabulously low rates, for the new 
company bought them with the rest of the 
abandoned property. And, from the begin- 
ning, Workman and Spinner agreed that the 
money of the company was to be made in 
manufacturing. It was not to be made out of 
rents or stores or the improvement of real 
estate in Hampton. The tenement houses 
were valued at an appraisement, and stood at 
very low charge on the books. Workman said, 
therefore, that he would rent them for four per 
cent, — what had been called in joke "the idiot's 
dividend," and nothing more. This gave each 
hand a considerable advantage at the first, 
because he was a partner very soon, even at 
" starvation wages." The men began to buy 
their houses from the corporation on low rates 
and terms which will appear in another chapter. 

Among Workman's friends there were sev- 
eral enthusiasts, each of whom undertook to 
engage ten or twelve hands in the departments 
needed. Much discussion pro and con went 
forward. At the last there was much shrink- 



THE PLAN. 31 

ing of wives from the proposed removal. On 
the other hand, there were some people who 
had been wrecked in the original failure at 
Hampton. They were all too eager to take 
hold, if in any way they might. Some of them 
proved very good people for the purpose. Most 
of them were the people who would not have 
succeeded anywhere. By such means the hands 
were got together, and the mill began to con- 
vert wool into woollens. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE RESULTS. 

SUCH was the history of the new start of 
Hampton, and the plan on which the sev- 
eral adventures were formed. It is clear enough 
that if they had not been bound together by 
other ties than those of mere business, as it is 
called, the enterprise would never have suc- 
ceeded as it did, — indeed, it would never have 
been. But they were united more closely. 
Every one of the leaders believed that, in the 
true order of society — the order which the Sav- 
iour of man lived and died to establish — there 
was a right way to do whatever the world needed 
done. They believed, therefore, that there was 
a right way to make woollen cloth, if only they 
could find out what it was. They meant to find 
it out, they were not afraid to ask God's bless- 
ing on that endeavor, nor to say to each other 
that they had asked it. With notions and aims 
as high as these, Mr. Spinner had carried his 
plan, not now conceived for the first time, to 
Mr. Nourse. 

He, too, had made the whole subject a matter 



THE RESULTS. 33 

of most serious inquiry. He had no wish to 
grow rich from the results of other men's in- 
dustry, unless they, in their places, had a chance 
to prosper also. He knew, however, that manu- 
facturing enterprise or mercantile adventure 
have their laws, as absolute as those of rain- 
fall or of tide-waves. He knew that, as he 
could not overpower those laws, more than 
King Canute could resist the flowing sea, what- 
ever his wealth and power, he could not, on the 
other hand, withstand them by any degree of 
sentiment or tenderness. He knew that the 
laws of trade and of social order must be studied, 
and that allowance must be made for them. Mr. 
Workman, and Mr. Spinner as well, wanted to 
see the right thing done. They were both as 
proud that they were not born with silver spoons 
in their mouths, as was ever any prince that he 
was cradled in purple. They were in no sort 
beggars for a change of position. They were 
workmen, and good workmen ; they had been 
trained to their craft, and knew how to do their 
work. What they wanted was, that the share 
which they contributed in the clothing of the 
world should be as cordially recognized as every 
other man's share. They knew that many others 
had a share in it, — capitalist, wool-grower, trans- 
porter, merchant, tailor, and stitching-girl. They 
believed that a fair division could be made some- 



34 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

how, which should recognize how much each of 
these parties fairly earned and deserved to have. 
This they wanted for themselves and their asso- 
ciates. They asked for no more. But they 
were satisfied with nothing less. Had any one 
asked either of these men for charity, he would 
have received what he asked for promptly. For 
they all understood what the word " charity " 
means, and acknowledged the obligation it de- 
scribes. But all of them knew that the relations 
between capital, which provided tools and mate- 
rials and work, which uses tools to manufacture 
materials, should not be relations of sentiment, 
or of charity, or of force. They should be rela- 
tions founded on the eternal laws of God. And, 
as all of them were Christian men, they believed 
that these laws were revealed in the Gospel. 

Recognizing, then, that for making woollen 
cloth, and bringing it to a fit market, three co- 
adjutors were necessary, — capital, work, and 
the directing skill which should enable capital 
to use the workman's industry ; they agreed 
that these three agencies should share equally 
in the profit of the article produced. The reader 
has seen the simple plan which they adopted. 

It worked better than they had dared to 
hope. For the first seven months, indeed, af- 
ter the machinery had been renewed, the mills 
repaired, and the new system set going, they 



THE RESULTS. 35 

had up-hill work. The market was flooded 
with the stock of bankrupt concerns, forced 
upon buyers by the assignees and creditors. 
Never, Spinner told me, had prices sunk so 
low, and never had the world looked so blackly 
on such adventure. But he had never given 
up his conviction, that the world must have 
warm clothing, — at least in the zones which 
were north of ten. degrees of Northern Lati- 
tude. He kept on making cloth, — better and 
better, he said, — as he was able to test his 
machinery and to train his hands, without over- 
working them. He knew, he said, to a quarter 
of a cent, what his cloth cost him. He was 
not yet obliged to sell a yard beneath that 
cost. He did sell a little at a very small ad- 
vance upon it. And he piled up a good deal, 
waiting for a rise. After seven months, the 
flood came. It wavered at first, and then 
poured in, cheerfully and hopefully. Some 
jobbers, who had taken a little of his cloth 
on commission, had received very flattering 
orders for more, amounting almost to carte- 
blanche for price ; so sound had the goods 
proved, and so well had the tailors been 
pleased who had used them. He was glad 
that he had insisted that the voyage should 
be a two years' voyage. But he began now 
to post very encouraging bulletins on his news- 



2,6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

boards. He would not make goods- by caucus, 
he said. But he did mean that men and boys 
should know which way the stream was run- 
ning which carried the fortunes of them all. 

He had, therefore, a regular habit of placing 
on his bulletin board such correspondence or 
other news as he thought the hands would be 
glad to read. I saved one or two of the old 
bulletins which he gave to me. 

No. 23. 

" Extract from a letter from New York : — 
From Mercer and Goodenough, this despatch 
is just received. Sold all A. A. at four eighths 
advance. Order for twice as much." 

For a considerable time after the mill began 
to run, they felt the worth of the new power 
enlisted. People were living very economical- 
ly, because they had only three-quarters of the 
wages they were used to. But every one of 
these same people had been living more eco- 
nomically, because they had no wages. That 
was undoubtedly a good stepping-stone for the 
new plan. After the beginning, however, there 
came a period of terrible depression of feeling. 
The absolute failure to sell any goods reacted 
on the men employed. They were used to 
receiving their pay without any great thought 



THE RESULTS. 37 

of the run of trade which supplied it. But to 
meet Mr. Spinner when he came back from 
New York, or to hear him talk, if he would 
talk, after he had received his mail, and to 
know that absolutely no money had come into 
the concern, — this dismayed men who knew, 
of course, that the thing could not run on 
forever on Mr. Nourse's original investment. 
They felt the reflection of the depression in 
the market, more, probably, than he would have 
done. This was the real "Slough of Despond" 
of the enterprise. Spinner spoke to me of it, 
and described it with a sort of shudder. And 
afterward Holmes and Dyer and Sheridan and 
Workman, — indeed, all of the older hands with 
whom I talked, spoke of it, and with bated 
breath, as if they hoped they might never 
have to go through such an experience again. 

" But this I have noticed, Mr. Freeman," said 
Holmes to me, "unless a man pulls through his 
Slough of Despond in any undertaking, he is no 
good. And I say that a woollen mill must live 
the life of a man. Anyhow, we went through 
it. It was a good lesson for every one of us 
who was in it. 

" We had a revival meeting, if you will let 
me call it so, about when things were at their 
worst. No, I do not mean what I suppose you 
might call a religious revival, but there was a 



38 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

good deal of religion in it, and, if there had 
not been, you and I would not be talking here. 
Almost all the leaders spoke. These gentle- 
men you know, all spoke. And they put it to 
the hands, as you might speak to the men in a 
sinking ship, if you were encouraging them to 
pump. But they put it man-fashion. They 
made the simplest wool-picker there under- 
stand that if he deserted the ship he was play- 
ing false to every man and every woman in 
the land, who was hoping for better times, bet- 
ter wages, and a better system. I know I told 
the men to go home and pray God to help to 
carry it through. I know I took my own ad- 
vice, and I think others did. 

" That meeting was the crisis. One or two 
fellows left us, — ' for their country's good.' 
But there was no grumbling after that, and 
even the work of the mill seemed to be bet- 
ter, and I know Workman said the same thing. 
It was some weeks before the business situation 
of the country seemed better. But we felt bet- 
ter as soon as we openly recognized the diffi- 
culty we were in, — well, and, so to speak, 
pledged ourselves to each other. Up to that 
time, we had all been prophesying success, — ■ 
'smooth things,' as I said last night. When 
that meeting came, we owned that the whole 
voyage was not a summer sail, and that every 



THE RESULTS. 39 

man had got to put his shoulder to the wheel, 
if we were to go through ; — yes, and to pray 
God to help him. That is the reason why I 
say that we never really prospered till we had 
gone through the 'Slough of Despond.'" 

It was not the Slough of Despond, but the 
reason of the thing, which induced Spinner 
and Workman, with Mr. Nourse's approval, to 
yield from the rigor of the original plan, which 
had demanded what Spinner had called "a two 
years' voyage." At the end of the first quarter 
of the second year the thing was well estab- 
lished, and in working order. Spinner had a 
large offer made him in New York for all the 
goods he had been piling up, and, though the 
market was probably still to rise, he determined 
not to bet on the possibility, but sold out for 
cash, so as to clear all his warehouses. And 
Spinner said to me that, on the whole, in his 
administration, he had gone on the principle 
that they were manufacturers and not specula- 
tors. " If I could sell our goods for what it 
cost us to make them, with a fair profit, and a 
fair margin to cover the losses on sales I was 
sometimes forced to make, because I needed 
money, — why, I thought I had better sell. 
I do not mean I had no right to hold on. 
Probably I had such a right. But I do not 
think the right is the same, when I am the 



40 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

manager, as I am here, for a hundred or two 
people who are joint owners in the goods, as it 
would be, — say, were I the owner of the An- 
dalusia, and owned all the goods myself. Now 
I am a trustee. Then I should be an owner." 

I took to heart what he said. And as I 
looked over his books one day, I could see the 
advantages the concern had derived from his 
rule. It need not be said that the public 
gained a similar advantage. It is undoubtedly 
for the advantage of the public that prices 
should not change by sudden leaps, and that 
the movements of trade shall not be affected 
by what are rightly called speculative plans. 
The co-operators of Hampton did not, I sup- 
pose, consider this advantage in making up 
their system. But it was one of the many 
points in which they builded better than they 
knew. 

Acting upon this policy, Mr. Spinner emptied 
his storehouses, and, as he sold for cash on 
very short credit, he had money in hand. Why 
should the first voyage be a two years' voyage ? 
They were already in port. He was able to de- 
clare his first dividend. Probably no person but 
himself and Workman had believed it would 
come out so well. They had made few losses, 
— nothing, indeed, of considerable account. 
And when the shares came to be divided 



THE RESULTS. 41 

among all hands it proved that, though so late 
a payment, it was large enough to compensate 
every one for the waiting. 

" My deary," said the old woman who washed 
the windows, when Spinner paid her first 
money-dividend to her, "if I had had the 
money, I should have spent it." And her 
simple confession was doubtless true with a 
great many more of these shareholders, whose 
investment in work had been larger than hers. 

From that time till the period of my visit the 
quarterly balance-sheet had been printed for 
the use of the workmen. It was theirs as 
much as it was Mr. Nourse's. They were his 
partners and knew they were, and by no senti- 
mental statement merely. Gradually they came 
to use the language of owners : " We shall do 
this ; " " We shall do that ; " " We made a mis- 
take in running so long on such a pattern ; " 
" We made a good thing of this." From the 
beginning they felt the need of avoiding waste. 
"There is not a mill on this stream but uses 
twice as much oil as I do ; " that was the boast 
which a young man made to me, who met the 
requisitions of the different rooms for the oil of 
their machinery. 

Spinner and Workman, in giving me the 
accounts which I have digested in these chap- 
ters, both spoke as if they were going back to 



42 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

a time far distant. In point of fact, the estab- 
lishment at Hampton was made only seven years 
before. But they had seen so rapid a develop- 
ment since their original timid plans, that they 
found it difficult sometimes to carry themselves 
to those antediluvian days. More than once 
Spinner came to me, after he had narrated 
something, to say that, on recurring to his 
notes on his memory, he found that he had 
antedated or postdated occurrences, and that 
he wanted to correct his original statement ; 
for they both knew that I was making memo- 
randa, and that I wished to draw up some such 
statement as I am making now. 

At the time I visited them the whole estab- 
lishment was running on as steadily as any 
manufacturing town in the country. A con- 
siderable part of Thankful Nourse's share in the 
capital had been taken off his hands by pur- 
chase from different heads of rooms, and, in 
one or two instances, by the widows of former 
workmen, who wished to remain in the place 
themselves, and liked to feel that they owned a 
part of the plant. " Corporation is co-operation " 
— this was a favorite saw of Spinner, Workman, 
and of a man named Holmes, of whom I have 
spoken, and shall have occasion to speak again. 

I copy one of their balance sheets to show 
its form. 



THE RESULTS. 43 

No. 37. 
Hampton Mills Balance Sheet for Six Months. 

Cr. 

By sales of manufactured goods, after commis- 
sions and expenses have been deducted . $167,892 11 

Dr. 

To amount work of operatives . $15,297 14 

To amount paid salaries, Work- 
man and Spinner .... 300 00 

For repairs (machinery and mill) 6,981 12 

Wool and supplies 111,291 14 

Interest paid to Thankful Nourse, 

Esq., and to Workman and 

Spinner 1,500 00 

Balance of profit to be divided . 38,522 71 

$167,892 11 

At the very beginning, the works had gone 
through their share of the difficulties of a begin- 
ning. After that slough of despond which has 
been described to the reader, there had come 
along heavy depression of business, which had 
very severely tried the temper of all these men, 
and which they thought might try the sympathies 
and steadiness of their friend Thankful Nourse. 
I believe, myself, that they quite misapprehended 
him in this impression. I did not say so to them, 
but I am quite willing to say here, that I think 
Mr. Nourse had had quite too much experience 



44 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

in business to suppose that there were to be 
years of plenty without years of famine follow- 
ing them. I do not believe that in New Zea- 
land, or Boothia Felix, or Novgorod, or the 
Malayan Islands, or wherever his wandering 
disposition had carried him, he gave one anx- 
ious thought to the investment he had made 
at Hampton. I suppose that, like most other 
capitalists, who have their passions under con- 
trol, — or, why should I not say frankly, who 
are religious men ? — he was willing to take the 
better and the worse together, and to submit 
with modesty and with loyalty to what he would 
frankly have called the "providence of God." 
I knew Nourse at one time very well, and I re- 
member that one of his favorite axioms, borrowed 
from Mr. Carlyle, was, "There was no act of 
Parliament that I should be happy." And he 
would apply this axiom in a dozen different 
ways. He would say, there was no act of Par- 
liament that the Andalusia should declare ten 
per cent ; there was no act of Parliament that 
Mr. Hayes should receive two-thirds of the 
votes for president ; there was no act of Parli- 
ament that the Britannia should arrive after a 
nine days' passage. In other words, he was 
willing to live in God's world, subject to some 
orders besides his own, and was not in the 
habit of complaining, because in any one year 



THE RESULTS. 45 

or two years, things did not turn out as he 
would have them turn out. 

He had not said so to Spinner in his negotia- 
tions with Spinner, but all the same he had not 
come to the determination to invest in this tri- 
partite arrangement, without solitary thought 
and without prayer. He believed that he had 
done the right thing in investing his money as 
he had done, although he had done a thing 
wholly new. Having come to this determina- 
tion, having asked God's help in making this de- 
termination, he held to this determination. If 
anybody had spoken to him about it, he would 
have been seriously annoyed ; but, if it were a 
person to whom he thought he must make an 
answer, — as, for instance, to his wife, possibly to 
an old friend like me, — he would have said, 
probably, " I have put my hand to the plough, 
and I do not propose to turn back." 

He would have meant that he regarded the 
capital given to him as given to him in trust to 
use for the best purposes. He had tried to use 
it for the best purposes when he made this dis- 
posal of it, and he would not worry himself, 
week by week, or month by month, or even 
year by year, in attending to the details. He 
would not dig up the tree which he had 
intentionally planted for a certain purpose 
in his lawn, because, at the end of the 



46 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

second year or the third year, he thought 
that the tree was not rooting itself properly. 

So much for the difficulties of the enterprise 
as they effected capital. They were not so 
great as Spinner and Workman fancied they 
were. To neither Spinner nor Workman could 
Mr. Nourse say all I did, nor were they accus- 
tomed to look at it from the point of view 
which is, I am sure, the true one. 

In another chapter I will show more at 
length than is worth while here, the experi- 
ences these two gentlemen themselves had. 
They were occupying a position which ap- 
peared to be somewhat new. They were sub- 
ject to a great deal of criticism from the men 
whom they were a little apt to call "sea-law- 
yers," although they had never been to sea. 
They borrowed this phrase from the sailors 
whom they knew very well in earlier life, who 
use it as an expression of contempt, by which 
they describe the men who are forever inciting 
sailors to mutinous or disrespectful thoughts of 
their employers, while they are not themselves 
good seamen. There are such men in all indus- 
tries, whether they go to sea or not. I have no 
doubt that Spinner and Workman both despised 
them, but still such critics had it in their power 
to make them very unhappy. Such critics were 
constantly trying to make the hands think that 



THE RESULTS. 47 

Workman and Spinner overestimated them- 
selves, — took airs upon themselves, — and, 
when dividends were made, took more than 
they had earned. The phrase, which Spinner 
had himself used when he said that he was to 
be a buffer between two cars and, if he could, 
ameliorate the shock, seemed a very pat one to 
describe the misfortunes which belong to the 
midway position. Workman said to me one 
day, half laughing, that he thought they would 
have fared better if there had been an old es- 
tablished name by which they could be called. 
In point of fact, they were called " managers " 
of the mill, and the dividend paid to them 
was the dividend paid to "management." He 
showed me a little treatise on the subject, 
written by I do not know whom, which said 
that in France the man would be called the 
entrepreneur, meaning the person who took hold 
between one end and the other. We have the 
same root in our word " enterprise," and Work- 
man said he was tempted to call himself an 
"enterpriser," and he wished that somebody 
had invented such a word two hundred years 
ago. He said, if it could be understood when 
they were spoken of, that the whole thing ex- 
isted because they were there, it would be bet- 
ter for them both, and he felt that if some good 
word could express this every time they were 



48 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

spoken of it would be a good thing. " Now," 
he said, " the word ( manager ' has in itself not 
a bad sound, but when we speak of managing a 
thing, we sometimes imply that we are manag- 
ing it in an underhand way. It is not always 
so. I believe nobody thinks the 'manager' of 
a theatre is necessarily a mean man ; but the 
moment we speak of a ' political manager,' we 
have the idea of a trick. I could wish, there- 
fore," he said, "that we were not called the 
management, but we are, and we have to bear 
our burden as well as we can." 

Nor were the workmen free from their share 
of annoyances. On the whole, the body cor- 
porate of Hampton sloughed off the inferior 
and dissatisfied people. The management was 
strong enough, and their friends were strong 
enough, to say squarely to the sea-lawyers and 
other such that if they did not like to stay at 
Hampton there was no act of Parliament by 
which they need stay there. 

They could be dismissed, at very short notice, 
from the mills ; and I was amused to find that 
this democratic management was very much 
more peremptory in such dismissals than were 
the directors of many a manufacturing estab- 
lishment which I had seen before, who were, 
to a large extent, afraid of irritating or wound- 
ing the feelings of their hands. There was 



THE RESULTS. 49 

no reason for any such fear in this case, be- 
cause the hands were, practically, with the 
management, the directors of the whole con- 
cern. On the whole, as I say, the hands 
were loyal to the plan. They were more and 
more interested in the plan. It cultivated their 
self-respect, and, as the reader has been told, 
it proved profitable to them. But none the 
less were they subject to invasions from com- 
mittees of inspection and committees of various 
delegates from county conventions, from " Fed- 
erations of Toilers," from "Organizations of In- 
dustry," from "Unions of Handicraft," and from 
various other organizations which had much more 
picturesque and mediaeval names. And these 
delegates either had some " wrong," showing 
that they were offended by the somewhat inde- 
pendent attitude of Hampton, or they had some 
new plan for the coming of the kingdom of 
heaven which they wanted to propose to the 
Hampton workmen. Now the Hampton work- 
men were, in fact, the most democratic set of 
people in the world. They were not proud, 
they appreciated good-fellowship and camarad- 
erie as much as any men did ; but they were 
beginning to own their own mill, they did have 
a third part of the profits of it, they wanted it 
to succeed, and they wanted it to succeed in 
their own way. They disliked to be lectured 



50 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

about the conduct of their business as much as 
any purse-proud capitalist in Lynn or in Ger- 
mantown dislikes to be lectured about his. Still 
it was not a nice thing, it was not an agreeable 
thing, to be placarded in all the workmen's jour- 
nals of the country as being only a mitigated set 
of scabs, or as being pretenders in wolves' cloth- 
ing, or as being people who, having got a snug 
thing themselves, were trying to kick down the 
ladder by which they had risen. All the same, 
they had this burden to bear ; and it was among 
the difficulties of the earlier days at Hampton. 

It is better to speak of all those difficulties to- 
gether, than to attempt to convey, in any his- 
torical narrative, the way in which they played 
in with each other, antagonized each other, and, 
at the same time, corrected each other. Gradu- 
ally everybody, probably, came to feel that, to 
borrow Mr. Nourse's maxim, there was no act 
of Parliament that Hampton should go on 
without its rubs and periods of starvation. On 
the whole, it had become more and more a fixed 
institution, with its own traditions, — and that 
is a matter of great importance, — with its own 
habits, which sprung from these traditions, — 
and with that success which belongs alike to 
established traditions and established habits. 

To sum up, under a few general heads, the 
more remarkable of these successes, I think I 



THE RESULTS. 5 I 

should say, first of all, that the system had 
brought in and kept in a very superior set of 
workmen and workwomen. There were not so 
many women engaged as there would generally 
have been in a mill of the size, and, as will be 
seen in another chapter, there were very few 
children engaged. But I knew enough of the 
woollen manufacture to know that the intelli- 
gence, quickness, promptness, and effectiveness 
of the slowest and poorest hands in any room 
was well up to the standard of the better half of 
the workmen or workwomen who would have 
been engaged in the same room in an ordinary 
establishment. I spoke to Spinner about this, 
and he said I was certainly right. He said he 
had thought of it a great deal ; he at one time 
tried to put in figures some statement of the 
advantage which they derived from the clear and 
undoubted superiority of their work-people. He 
had not found it possible to make any tabular 
or distinctive statement. " But it amounts to 
this," he said. "They are all determined that 
this thing shall succeed ; they are determined 
the cloth shall be good, and shall maintain the 
reputation that it has in the market. If there 
is any new style, if there is a bit of new ma- 
chinery, if there is a new fad about dyeing, — no 
matter what it is, it is a thing that interests them 
as much as a new baby interests the people in 



52 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

the house where it is born. They pet the baby 
and cuddle it and do everything they can to 
make the new plan prove satisfactory." In the 
long run, this is evidently so. I am disposed to 
think it springs from self-respect quite as much 
as from self-interest, to which it might ordinarily 
be ascribed, and it is of great value in any work. 
And when you come to any change, — when one 
of the heads of a room, for instance, finds it for 
his advantage to take a higher place in some 
other mill, when you want to promote somebody 
to the vacant position, you find that the people 
who have been faithful in few things are really 
able to be masters of many things, and that you 
can promote them without difficulty, and with- 
out injury to the running of your organism. 

I am not quite sure whether I am right, but 
the saving of material proved also to be very 
considerable. Even in such a detail as this of 
oil, which is a very considerable charge in a wool- 
len mill, the young men who had the care of the 
oil-room were so careful that, very early in the 
affair, Workman and Spinner found that these 
fellows had driven up the others to care, amount- 
ing almost to parsimony, indeed, which involved 
very considerable reduction. Among the papers 
which I brought away, as memorials of my visit, 
is a little printed bulletin, numbered 13, which 
is a boast that, in the four weeks preceding, 



THE RESULTS. 53 

seventy-three gallons of oil had been saved com- 
pared with the expenditure in the corresponding 
four weeks in the preceding year. In the reduc- 
tion of the amount of wool used, Workman 
himself acknowledged to me that he had been 
surprised. They told me that, at the begin- 
ning, it was not infrequent to find that, with 
the same number of yards completed, one per 
cent of wool had been saved in a single week. 
Of course such improvement as this could not 
go on forever. But it hardly ever happened 
that the hands relaxed the care to which they 
were trained, partly by self-interest, partly by 
loyalty, and partly indeed, by pride. They 
entered into the feeling of an old-fashioned 
housekeeper, who hates to see things thrown 
away. She even wants her children to eat 
after their hunger is satisfied, because she does 
not like to have anything left on the plate. 
Everybody in every department of these mills 
had that same unwillingness to see anything 
lost which might have been made useful. In 
another chapter, I will describe at some length 
the pride which I found all the leaders of the 
system taking in the young life of their vil- 
lage. Seven years had changed the boys and 
girls of ten into young men and women of 
seventeen, — the most miraculous change which 
takes place in human life. It required no hint 



54 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

from those who were most interested, to make 
me see that these young men and maidens were 
people of a type quite different from the young 
people of their age whom one would find in 
a manufacturing town, where everything had 
been neglected, and where no central power 
was trying to bring out the very best training 
for the young, and to surround them with the 
most cheerful and happy influences. 

Without going farther into such details, it may 
be said that nothing is so successful as success. 
The financial success of Hampton appears to 
me, now that I am looking back upon the whole, 
as the least interesting and the least impor- 
tant feature in its administration and in its his- 
tory. I shall hardly be believed, but I think 
that four out of five, nay, perhaps that all of 
the leading members of the community would 
say, that they have ceased to think of the finan- 
cial success as being the first matter which they 
considered. They found themselves in a place 
where there was no longer any irritation in the 
discharge of their daily duty. Everybody knew 
he was justly treated. There was no longer that 
angry question why things were not otherwise, 
which, under other circumstances, would have 
embittered the first waking at morning, would 
have embittered every morsel of food, would 
have embittered the hour when he retired to bed 



THE RESULTS. 55 

at night. This was all gone. Whether the thing 
succeeded or not, the thing was fair, and this 
sense of fairness gave an evenness to people's 
lives which the older members of the commu- 
nity knew how to value. Next to this, I should 
say that there was a certain enlargement of life, 
which they could hardly define themselves, per- 
haps, and perhaps did not compare with the 
somewhat limited range of the life of people, who 
were taking care of themselves and taking care 
of none beside. These people were living, not 
a mere personal life, but in the life of the com- 
munity. They had all common interests, and 
these interests were really large interests. To 
be taken out of themselves, — to be thinking of 
something better than their own headaches and 
heartaches, — this was in itself an advantage 
which, whether they knew how to state it in 
words or not, affected every hour of every day. 

The great essential of all society is, that the 
lines of promotion be kept open. A man can 
bear even a very hard life, if he has reason to 
think that next week something is going to open 
before him which will enable him to throw off 
this or that discomfort of to-day. On the other 
hand, a man will chafe in a very prosperous life, 
if you tell him that, by any fatality, he must live 
on with that machinery, in that habit, eating 
that food, and doing that work forever. Open 



56 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

promotion is the central word for American so- 
ciety and American life. This open promotion 
was the privilege of every man and woman, boy 
and girl, in Hampton. It might not come very 
soon, but every one knew that it was ready and 
possible. It will be shown in another chapter 
that the boys and girls were by no means chained 
or constrained to a future in which they should 
be operatives in a woollen factory, their life long. 
Already there were instances where the young 
people who had this taste or that gift, leading 
them into other occupations, had followed those 
tastes or used those gifts. Nobody felt com- 
pelled, by the law of the instrument, to accept 
one position or another. There was, on the 
other hand, that openness of choice which seems 
to be the requisite of any happy life. 

This is a poor enough statement of details, 
and a poor enough effort to analyze the prosper- 
ity of a successful community. Perhaps it would 
have been as well to say that these people had, on 
the whole, tried to meet the duties which came to 
them, as Christian men and women. They had 
done their best, on the whole, to carry out the 
Christian law of love ; they certainly were living 
daily with the loyal hope that the future was to 
be even better than the present ; and this love 
and this faith were based on an abiding faith in 
God, whose law they were trying to obey. I am 



THE RESULTS. $7 

not sure that I heard any man say so while I was 
in Hampton, but when I look back upon their 
life, or what people are pleased to call their 
experiment, it does not seem to me that that 
experiment was so hazardous, for I always re- 
member who said that, if any community of 
brethren would trust first the kingdom of God 
and His righteousness, all the little things of 
time, for which petty men are selfishly anxious, 
will certainly be added to the endeavor of that 
community. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE STORE. 

I DID not like to hang about the counting- 
room for an unreasonable length of time, and 
yet I was so much interested in what I saw at 
Hampton that I did not abridge my visit. As 
I have intimated, I could occupy myself in the 
woods and by the brooks, but I also found that 
I became acquainted among the workmen and 
their wives and children ; and bearing in mind all 
along the object of my visit, I followed up such 
acquaintances. Travelling as long as I had been, 
there was one and another matter which I wanted 
to refit in my little luggage, and so I went into 
the "store" once and again for my purchases. 
It is the standing miracle of a place like this, 
when it is well kept, that the clerk is able to 
supply you with everything you need, from a 
heron's wing to a hand-saw. I found that they 
could fit my watch with a new crystal just as 
readily as I found that they could sell me hooks 
and flies of the last London patterns. Some- 
times the store was wholly empty, and I was 
the only customer. Sometimes, on the other 



THE STORE. 59 

hand, there would be twenty or thirty people 
there, almost always women, for I observed that 
the women seemed to be the purse-holders and 
were intrusted with the buying and selling of 
this community. I stored up many questions 
to put to Spinner about the mechanism by which 
these results were obtained, and one afternoon, 
as we were driving together, I brought them all 
out, and made him answer them all together. 

" I see you have got on quite a central affair," 
he said. " I shall make but a blundering story 
of it, for indeed the system is one we have hit 
upon from hand to mouth, if indeed it be a sys- 
tem yet, and yet I think it is beginning to work 
well. 

" When I came up here first with Workman, I 
said to him that whatever else we did, in our new 
capacity as manufacturers, we would wash our 
hands of 'store-pay,' with all its complications, 
jealousies, and iniquities. You can see yourself 
that there is a great temptation for a man who 
comes into a new neighborhood, actually cuts 
down trees and builds houses for a community, 
to take upon himself the maintenance of the 
country store. It is very easy to persuade such 
a man that it is his duty to do so ; that he should 
keep his workmen from being cheated ; and, in 
four cases out of five, it is very probable that he 
does. Still the thing is false in theory. Either 



60 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

a man is a manufacturer or he is a tradesman. 
If he is a manufacturer, he is, so far forth, not 
a tradesman, and if he is a tradesman, he is, so 
far forth, not a manufacturer. Precisely as the 
head of a factory had better not be the leader 
of a military band, or as he had better not be 
a publisher of school-books, he had better not be 
the man to keep a country store. At least, that 
was what I said to Workman, and what Work- 
man said to me. We had seen endless jealousies 
among workmen because they supposed their 
employers were cheating them in this way, and 
he said that, in our model town here, this diffi- 
culty should not exist. I do not think we gave 
much thought as to what should come in its 
place ; I suppose we were too easy about that, 
and imagined that it was one of those things 
which would take care of itself. In which easi- 
ness of ours, however, we were much mistaken, 
for the thing has given us as much difficulty as 
anything has given us which we have had to 
handle here. It has given us the more difficulty 
because we are what you see, — the only ele- 
ment of life here ; there is absolutely nothing 
but what we bring here, which divides this place 
from such a wilderness as you saw yesterday 
when you were fishing above Jotham's Ledge. 

" We both saw, when we looked at the prop- 
erty we had bought, that - there was a building 



THE STORE. 6 1 

for a store, which the old company had carried 
on. Its reputation was of the worst. They had 
paid their workmen in orders on the store, and, 
rightly or not, the workmen thought that these 
orders had been the means of endless cheating. 
When we began to talk with men about coming 
up, the natural question was where they were to 
do their marketing, and how they were to buy 
their groceries, and so on. This question we 
could only answer by the proud statement that 
there was to be no store-pay, — that though we 
did not pay much we should pay cash, and that 
they might buy where they chose. This pleased 
the workmen very much, till they found that 
buying where they chose meant going down to 
Wentworth or going down to Whitby's. And 
before long, there came a drummer up here, who 
saw we had an empty store, and asked if we did 
not want to have a store up here, and we said 
we did. Before a week was over, he communi- 
cated with his employers, and they had sent up 
a clerk who had prospected, and we had a store 
established here, purely on Adam Smith's prin- 
ciple, that the demand created the supply. The 
man hung out a big sign, and his goods began 
to come in. 

" I found very soon that the people disliked 
him and his quite as much as the people before 
them disliked the store-pay of their employers. 



62 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Naturally enough, his principals pushed off on 
us what they could not sell at home, and, in par- 
ticular, they pushed off on us the wares, such as 
they were, of which they were special agents. 
The boys laughed very much because there was 
an immense display of canned tomatoes and 
canned corn and other such stuff, and they said 
they were expected to live on canned vegetables 
that were ten years old. Somebody would take 
the cars down to Wentworth, and the next day 
would have his groceries sent over the road here, 
for a quarter dollar, and then would brag to the 
others about how much he had saved by his lit- 
tle journey. So they very soon starved that man 
out. After him, the Wentworth people tried to 
establish a branch here, but on the whole they 
gave that up. It was better for them, though 
it was not so well for us, to have our men send 
their wives over the road and do their shopping 
at their headquarters establishment, than it 
was to be keeping a couple of clerks alive here 
through the machinery of a separate store. 

" It happened that at that time George Hol- 
yoake was in the country. I do not think his 
message was introducing the Rochdale system 
here, but I knew he knew all about it, and I sent 
to him and asked him if he would come and see 
us in the course of his travels. So it was that 
our people had a chance to hear him talk one 



THE STORE. 63 

night, and he was good enough to give them an 
off-hand talk on the working of the Rochdale 
system, and said something as to the reason why 
it had not introduced itself more fully in America. 
The reason is, in brief, that our people like to 
move from place to place as much as they do, 
and the Rochdale plan really rests, though I 
hardly think the Englishmen know it, on the 
understanding that the more intelligent work- 
men in a mill stay by the mill from the time they 
are born till the time they die. At the bottom of 
his boots, the Englishman does not like to move 
from place to place with his family ; while at 
the bottom of his boots an American does. 
However, we had had a great deal of trouble 
from the supply and demand system, and Work- 
man himself and some other of the more intelli- 
gent men were well disposed to try the Rochdale 
system, as Holyoake explained it to us. Mark 
my words. You are going from place to place 
in America, and you hear a great deal of talk 
about co-operation in trade ; but I tell you that 
the man is a fool who thinks he knows more 
about the principles of co-operation than these 
hard-headed Englishmen have found out in the 
course of seventy-five years of every kind of ex- 
perience. They do not theorize a great deal in 
England, but they do know facts ; and the Roch- 
dale system, which is a difficult system to ex- 



64 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

plain, has come into being from the observation 
of the failure of more systems than were ever 
tried in America. So far as I have seen, the 
experiments of co-operations in trade in America 
have failed very steadily, because in every in- 
stance there was a man who was more or less a 
crank, who founded the store, or whatever he 
called it, and he was determined to try his own 
system. Now the Rochdale system is not any 
man's system in particular ; it is the result of a 
great many failures and some successes, and the 
fact that it works as well as it does in England 
is a certain and strong argument in its favor." 

I said to Spinner that I ought to know what 
the Rochdale system was, but that I did not, 
and asked him if there was any brief statement 
of it. He said " Oh yes ! " and he telephoned to 
the store to ask them to send over to me one of 
their little reports which had an account of the 
system as they meant to apply it ; and I will 
print it in the form in which they gave it to me 
at the end of this chapter. 



"The up shot of it all is," said Spinner, "that 
the store is well kept and not badly kept. Old 
Randolph was right when he said that there was 
no manure like the foot of the owner. They 
have turned out a good many clerks, and a good 



THE STORE. 65 

many have resigned because they wanted to turn 
them out, but I am disposed to think that those 
young fellows they have there now understand 
the business quite as well as if they had been 
sent up from New York for the purpose. I 
know very well that the two young women who 
kept the accounts and write the letters under- 
stand the business a great deal better than most 
of the people I see in similar capacities, when I 
am in Broadway. Here is something gained at 
the beginning. In the second place, nobody can 
complain ; or, if he does complain, he carries his 
complaints where he ought to carry them, in- 
stead of bringing them to me or to you or to 
Workman or to anybody else who has nothing to 
do with it. What do I care whether the ' boiled 
shirt ' which one of my pickers buys is made 
according to the last London fashion or not ? I 
would not be bothered with such things, — and 
as this thing works I am not bothered with it. 
The man who buys the shirt is to a certain ex- 
tent the man who sells the shirt. At all events, 
if the person who selected the shirt has selected 
it wrong, it is the fault of the buyer, who ought 
to have been at the quarterly meeting and chosen 
somebody else in the directory. You can hardly 
understand, living as you do, what a relief it is 
to be relieved from all this nonsense. 

" Then, in general, all these co-operative shops 



66 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

have the great advantage that they have no need 
whatever to advertise their wares or their exist- 
ence. You will find that the largest co-opera- 
tive shops in England hardly advertise at all. 
Every purchaser is interested in making some- 
body else purchase, and he is 'touting,' con- 
sciously or unconsciously, for the shop all the 
time. When anybody comes to make a visit 
here, — you, for instance, — the visitor goes 
to the store and buys there. And when you 
bought a watch key the other day it was to the 
advantage of every man in this village that you 
bought it here instead of buying it in New Ha- 
ven. If you only take into account the relief to 
you that you do not see the long bragging ad- 
vertisements in the village newspaper, it is a 
good deal ; but really these people have no occa- 
sion whatever to advertise. 

" Of course they have no occasion whatever to 
keep adulterated goods, or to keep anything 
which is not what it pretends to be. Why 
should a man cheat himself ? Why should the 
person who is going to buy the goods send an 
agent down to New York to buy pickles which 
are artificially stained, or coffee which has been 
made out of paste, or anything else which is not 
what it pretends to be ? You are pleased to 
compliment our shop ; really, this freedom from 
all temptation to buy inferior articles has a great 



THE STORE. 67 

deal to do with the merit of what you have 
seen. 

" Whether such a system as I have described 
to you can be made to succeed in America on a 
scale larger than that upon which we are trying, 
it is more doubtful. But I am quite clear about 
this, — that if some man who knows this coun- 
try well, and knows the habit of our working- 
men, will give the same pains to this subject 
here that Holyoake has done in England, we 
shall get an American adaptation of the Roch- 
dale plan which will answer our purpose. The 
adaptation which we have made here may not 
be such as they would need somewhere else. 
What we have done is to give rather more cap- 
ital stock to the undertaking in the beginning 
than could be supplied by the simple co-opera- 
tive principle. Holyoake would have rebuked 
us for this, I think, but it was really necessary 
in the conditions in which we were. I hope as 
heartily as he would do, that gradually we may 
have the affair more precisely on the English 
basis, but that is still a matter for experiment 
with us. I say this because I do not, as I have 
said, care to vary much from the only successful 
experiment of this sort which has been tried in 
the world. 

" I had been greatly impressed by what George 
Holyoake says in all his books of the desirable- 



68 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ness of each store maintaining, as a store, its 
reading-room and other methods of instruction. 
There was a very decent room or hall in the sec- 
ond story of the store building, which we had 
turned over to them ; and, after communication 
with Mr. Nourse, I agreed to let that room go 
without any additional rent, and to be at the 
cost of fitting it up with tables and chairs, for a 
reading-room. It serves, of course, for the busi- 
ness meetings of the proprietors of the store, 
and the men bring to it such newspapers, mag- 
azines, and books as they care to have there. 
They are permitted to smoke there, and it be- 
comes a very respectable club-room for the vil- 
lage. After a while, the women complained that, 
although they were often stockholders in the 
store, they could not stay where the men were 
smoking ; and it ended in my giving the use of 
another room, which was a sort of back build- 
ing, which was fitted up for a general reading- 
room, as it was called, where smoking was pro- 
hibited. I think, on the whole, this has proved 
to be the more popular room of the two, and 
there is little competition between them as to 
which shall get the latest magazines and the 
best, and the presence of the women adds the 
element of attractiveness to the place, which, to a 
considerable extent, competes with the attraction 
of the pipes and the freer rules of the original 



THE STORE. 69 

room. All this you will see if you go through 
the store ; or, if you look at the accounts, you 
will see that something — not much — is spent 
for the library and reading-room in every quar- 
terly distribution. When they are prosperous, 
they are likely to make rather a larger distribu- 
tion ; then when they are poor they appropriate 
nothing at all ; in fact, this goes more or less by 
fancy, according as the drift of a meeting is led 
by a parsimonious member or by one who has 
more liberal views." 

I took an early opportunity, therefore, to go 
into the store in the forenoon, after the women 
had gone away. There was no one in when I 
entered, but, at the sound of my entrance, Mr. 
Ledger, the storekeeper, appeared from a room 
behind, which, as I afterwards found, was the 
reading-room. 

I told him that people spoke to me about 
the Rochdale system as if of course everybody 
understood it, somewhat as people speak about 
the Christian religion as if everybody understood 
that. But I said I had found a great many people 
talk about the Rochdale system who knew noth- 
ing about it, and that I was willing to confess 
that, though I had bought coats and hats and 
slippers and portfolios at the co-operative store 
in London, I did not know why they were cheap, 
and indeed, I hardly knew why I went there. 



yO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

I found Mr. Ledger was an enthusiast in the 
matter, and was only too glad to have a hearer 
to whom he could talk for one of the quiet hours 
of the middle of the day, when he hardly had 
any customers. I observed that there was a 
boy, who attended to the one or two children 
who did drop in for some trifling purchase. 

He said that the idea of co-operation in the 
purchasing of necessary articles was, as I knew, 
an idea which had been experimented upon, no- 
body knew how far back. " Nothing is easier," 
he said, "than for a dozen families to think they 
will buy their coal together at wholesale, will 
divide it in the quantities they want, and so 
make the profit which would ordinarily go to the 
retail dealer who keeps a coal yard. But practi- 
cally, you know such schemes as that never con- 
tinue many years. There are so many con- 
veniences in the coal yard, that after all you go 
back to them, and persuade yourself that the 
profit you made was not worth the trouble. I 
remember that when I lived in Boston I could 
go down to a certain point, perfectly well known, 
at half-past five in the morning, and I could buy 
my fresh fish there, at the rate of about a cent 
and a half a pound. But I never did go there. 
I went to a fish dealer, who made me pay any- 
where between ten cents and twenty cents a 
pound. I did not want more than five or six 



THE STORE. 7 1 

pounds of fish, and it was really not worth the 
while for me to get up, perhaps before daylight, 
go out to the place where fish was sold at whole- 
sale, and bring it back. In that story is told 
the whole of the reason why we pay so much as 
we do for articles at retail, and why, on the whole, 
it is an advantage for us to pay it. I suppose 
there is no profit more fairly made than the profit 
of the retailing middleman, much abused as he 
always is. However, as I said before, nobody 
can say how far back experiments of groups of 
people buying to please themselves have been 
tried. Sometimes it has been tried successfully 
for a good many years, but nothing ever came 
of it. 

" Now the peculiarity of the Rochdale system, 
which has made it succeed and grow, is this. 
The more a man purchases, and the more he can 
make other people purchase, the larger is his in- 
terest in the concern, and the larger his profit. 
If ten men should subscribe five hundred dollars 
apiece, to make five thousand dollars capital with 
which to carry on this store, they would have, 
of course, an equal interest in the profits of the 
store. They would try, as they could, to induce 
as many people to come there and trade. But 
there would be only these ten people who had 
a personal interest in the success of the store. 

"If, on the other hand, every person who 



72 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

deals with us is personally interested in making 
the store successful, why, every one of them will 
bring in more customers ; every one of them will 
buy with us ; rather than go down to Wentworth 
or to New Haven to buy ; every one of them will 
advertise us in whatever way he can.' As a mat- 
ter of justice, or, I think, as a matter of religion, 
the people who really sustain the store by buying 
goods at it, are the people who ought to make 
the profit if there is any profit to be made. 
It is exactly like a mutual life insurance com- 
pany, you see. Supposing the year is a healthy 
year, ought not the people to have the benefit 
whose lives are insured ? or, if is an unhealthy 
year, ought they not to pay for the unhealthi- 
ness ? Just in the same way, if, for any reason, 
the store is a profitable store, I think, as a mat- 
ter of Christian justice, the people who deal at 
the store ought to have the advantage. What 
does a profitable year mean ? It means that the 
price which has been put on the retail of the 
goods was rather higher than the necessities of 
the business demanded. In other words, the man 
who bought raisins and sugar here paid us rather 
more than we need have asked him. If he paid 
us more, why should not we give it back to him, 
if we mean to deal — as, of course, we do mean 
to deal — on terms coming as near to absolute 
justice as is possible in human affairs ? 



THE STORE. 73 

" But this, you will say, is theoretical. Taking 
the thing practically, here am I, managing this 
store. I was brought up to this sort of business. 
I have owned a store, and I have been a clerk in 
a store. To be an owner means that I have come 
out at the end of the year not knowing how I 
was to meet my notes in February. This on the 
one hand ; on the other hand, I have been paid 
a salary, once a week or once a month, from the 
time when I had three dollars a week, for sweep- 
ing out a store, to the time when I had twenty- 
five hundred dollars, because I was the best 
person they could employ at Pickering yonder. 
Now, I am working here on a salary. I am one 
of the kind of men that like to work on a salary. 
Some men do, and some men don't ; but after 
one had had experience of the ups and downs 
— the good fortune and bad fortune — of what 
is called business life, if he is such a person as I 
am he likes the regularity of a paid salary. A 
paid salary I have here. Beside that, I own some 
stock in this store ; on that stock I draw my divi- 
dends. Beside that, I buy almost everything I 
need for my family here. I buy just as any other 
customer would buy, and, according to the amount 
of my purchases in a year, I am also entitled to a 
dividend." 

By this time I was a little confused, and I said 
as much to Mr. Ledger. He laughed, and said : — 



74 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

" The whole thing is so simple to us that we 
take it for granted that everybody will under- 
stand it at the first blush. But if you will study 
the little book of directions of ours, and then 
come in and see me to-morrow, I will try to make 
it clear to you." 

Accordingly I took his book of directions, 
which I copy here for the benefit of people as 
little informed as I was. 

Hampton Co-operative Store. 

For the information of members, of purchas- 
ers, and of all concerned, the following state- 
ment is printed, copied from distinguished writ- 
ers on the subject of co-operation. It will show 
the principles on which the store is conducted. 

Persons who wish more detailed information 
will receive a copy of the Regulations of the 
Store, by application to Mr. Ledger, at the store 
itself. 

Principles of Co-operative Trade. 

In a properly constituted store the funds are 
disposed of quarterly in seven ways : — 

1. Rent, and expenses of management. 

2. Interest due on all loans. 

3. An amount equal to ten per cent of the 
value of the fixed stock, set apart to cover its 
annual reduction in value, owing to wear and 
tear. 



THE STORE. 75 

4. Dividends on subscribed capital of mem- 
bers. 

5. Such sum as may be required tor extension 
of business. 

6. Two and one half per cent of the remain- 
ing profit, after all the above items are provided 
for, to be applied to educational purposes. 

7. The residue, and that only, is then divided 
among all the persons employed, and members 
of the store, in proportion to the amount of their 
wages, or of their respective purchases during 
the quarter, varying from six per cent to ten. 

The peculiar distinction of a co-operative 
store is that a fixed interest is divided upon cap- 
ital, say five per cent upon the shares each mem- 
ber holds, and then all net profits are divided to 
the trade upon the business each member has 
done. 

No credit is allowed, of any sort, to any pur- 
chaser. The store buys for cash, and its mem- 
bers have the advantage of such purchase. It 
therefore sells for cash, and for cash only. 



To secure the necessary capital for making a 
store which shall meet the needs of Hampton, 
the first twenty dollars of profit earned by any 
purchaser will be charged to his credit, as one 



j6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

share of his capital. After he is the owner of 
one share of capital, he will receive five per cent 
annual dividend on that share, and his profits 
will be paid to him in cash at the quarterly set- 
tlements. 

The store cannot keep open accounts with 
persons who are not regular customers. Unless 
purchases to the amount of one dollar are made 
in each quarter, the purchaser loses all right to 
a dividend. 

The prices of the store will be as low as the 
best stores in the neighborhood. The quality of 
goods will always be what it is represented. 
We have no motive to cheat ourselves, and, as 
the purchasers are the same persons who sell 
the goods, we have no motive to tell ourselves 
lies. 

We spend nothing for advertising. If you 
wish to increase the business of the store, tell 
your neighbors the truth about it, and bring them 
to see. 

Rules & Regulations. 

i. Every person above the age of 14, residing in 
this town, may become a member of the co-opera- 
tive store, on the payment of twenty-five cents. 

2. This money will be placed to his credit. 



THE STORE. JJ 

3. Each share of the company costs twenty 
dollars. So soon as members have paid for one 
share, they are privileged to attend quarterly, 
annual, and social meetings. Members are urged 
to complete the payment for their shares as soon 
as possible. 

4. For the amount of all purchases made at 
one time, the purchaser, if a member, will receive 
a metal check, stamped with figures indicating 
the amount of his purchase. He must present 
these checks. They are the only vouchers rec- 
ognized for his purchases. 

5. When he presents these checks, once a 
quarter, the cashier will give him a statement, 
made from them, of the amount of his purchases. 

6. He is entitled to a dividend in proportion 
to the amount he has bought. Thus, if he has 
bought one hundredth part of all the shop has 
sold, he is entitled to one hundredth part of all 
its profits. 

7. Until his first share is paid for, his divi- 
dends are passed to his credit, in payment for 
that share. But it is a great convenience to the 
store for members to pay in cash for their first 
shares, at once. 

8. On each share, thus paid for, he will be 
paid quarterly a dividend of one and a quarter 
per cent, — amounting to five per cent in a year. 

9. The receipts of the store will be divided 



78 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

quarterly, after the expenses have all been met, 
including rent, cost of management, an allowance 
for depreciation of the goods and furniture, and 
six per cent interest on capital. The residue 
will be divided among the purchasers. 

10. Purchasers who have not become mem- 
bers of the society will receive only half the 
dividend to which they would be entitled had 
they joined the society. And no person will 
receive any dividend unless his purchases have 
amounted to the sum of one dollar at one time. 



Officers. 

i. The officers of the society are a President, 
five Directors, a Secretary, and a Treasurer. 

2. They make their own rules. 

3. They appoint the Storekeeper and his 
Clerks. 

4. They are responsible for all purchases, and 
for the careful management of the property. 

5. The books of the society are open to the 
inspection of any member, on the approval of a 
majority of the whole Board of Management. 



The Quarterly Meetings are held on the after- 
noon of Tuesday after the second Monday of 
February, May, August, and November. The 
annual meeting is held in November, at such a 



THE STORE. 79 

time as may be ordered at the quarterly meeting 
of that month. 



And when I left Hampton, Mr. Ledger, know- 
ing that I had some thoughts of establishing a 
co-operative store at Pigotsville, where I had an 
interest, gave me these cautions to officers, 
which he had digested from the English writers. 



The Management : Officers and Employees, 
their Appointment and Duties. 

i. The Committee and Officers. — There is 
almost always a chairman and secretary, some- 
times a treasurer, and a varying number of 
committeemen. 

Election. — The Chairman or President of the 
society is generally chosen by the members in 
quarterly meeting, sometimes by the committee 
from among themselves. The Secretary, if a 
paid servant, employed for accounts and other 
matters of business, will be, and in the opinion 
of most Co-operators certainly ought to be, ap- 
pointed or dismissed by the committee. If the 
secretary is only a minute secretary for commit- 
tee-meetings, &c, he will be one of the commit- 
tee, and will be appointed by them, or might be 
elected, if desirable, in general meeting ; and in 



80 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

this case, all the other duties are undertaken 
by a paid official, whether general manager, 
cashier, or otherwise. The Treasurer may be 
chosen in either way. If there is no treasurer, 
the secretary will discharge his duties. In the 
opinion of some Co-operators, a treasurer is not 
necessary. 

Auditors. — It is most important that good 
men should be selected. They ought to re- 
member what a grave responsibility rests upon 
them in signing balance sheets. They should 
be careful of their own reputation, and not 
run risks or try to screen the committee. 
They ought to have a full knowledge of ac- 
counts, which is not always found. 

Payment. — In most societies committee-men 
are paid for their attendance at the weekly com- 
mittee ; but it is most desirable, in fixing the 
scale of payment, to avoid the likelihood of 
men trying to get on to the committee simply 
for the sake of the fees. This is a danger to be 
carefully watched in the co-operative movement. 
The work of its managing men (not its paid of- 
ficials, to whom it is a profession) should be 
that of volunteers, who are repaid in modera- 
tion for their expense of time and trouble, and 
who will withdraw or resign their position at 
once, without a moment's hesitation on the 
score of money, if that is being done of which 



THE STORE. 8 1 

they so strongly disapprove that they believe 
this to be the right course ; otherwise they are 
not independent, and may tend to get into the 
hands of men more powerful than themselves, 
who are well aware they will not resign if they 
can possibly help it. 

The Secretary may receive some additional 
fee for his clerical labors. 

Sub-committees. — In most societies there are 
sub-committees to give special attention to the 
various departments of the society work, — one 
for groceries, another for bakery, another for 
butchery, &c. In the earlier stages of a so- 
ciety it may not be desirable, but later on it 
becomes almost a necessity. As a rule, work- 
ingmen committees have only the evenings 
free, and the whole committee could not pos- 
sibly all of them go into the matters requiring 
attention. Subdivision of the work is neces- 
sary. 

Duties of Committeemen and Officers. — The 
Chairman should have firmness, impartiality, 
coolness, keenness and'* tact. It is no good 
having a chairman, however virtuous, good- 
natured, or consistent, if he cannot keep a 
meeting in order. The Secretary should be 
able to work hard and continuously, must be 
well up in figures, and must write well and 
quickly. A bad secretary can bring a society 



82 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

to grief very quickly. He ought not to try to 
dictate to the committee, and, whatever his 
own opinions, ought loyally to carry out their 
decisions. In a committee there are always 
likely to rise up rival parties. This ought to 
be avoided as far as possible. A member 
should firmly state his opinion, and accept a 
defeat with good temper, or, if the matter is 
serious, resign. He ought to feel himself free 
to resign, if necessary, as has been mentioned 
before. Party spirit on a committee is to be 
deplored. The members should not send hot- 
headed firebrands into office. They should 
send steady-going, able men, who have a ca- 
pacity for patient, persistent enthusiasm that 
commands success and is not afraid of diffi- 
culties. The committee should aim at keep- 
ing the confidence of their members ; should 
remember that the constitution of the society 
is republican ; should not mind criticism, but 
welcome it. It should be considered a golden 
rule that the committee should never unneces- 
sarily keep anything back from the members, 
unless its being known is likely to be injuri- 
ous to the society. Committees should desire 
publicity and criticism of any kind within rea- 
sonable limits. They should not be thin- 
skinned, or make too frequent appeals to the 
forbearance of members. Members ought to 



THE STORE. 83 

have the moving power in as many matters as 
possible, and this power should not be taken 
from them. 

Publicity and frank and full discussion of all 
matters concerning the welfare of a society are 
essential to its well-being. Many a society has 
come to a bad end through the want of this. 
The committee should never be jealous of ris- 
ing talent among the members. There are 
plenty of outlets for activity ; and, perhaps 
more than anything else, what is needed now, 
is that committees should encourage young 
members to be personally interested in the 
fuller and higher development of Co-operation 
in many different ways. A great deal can be 
done in the way of training up good and loyal 
members and active and efficient officers in a 
society where a good spirit prevails, and where 
the best men have an influence such as they 
deserve. 

Servants of the Society. — All servants of the 
society are almost invariably appointed and dis- 
missed by the committee. 

The Manager. — Upon the question what 
kind of person is the storekeeper, manager, 
or buyer, depends, to a very large extent, the 
success or failure of the society. Is he to be 
the master or the servant of the committee? 
What is to be the relation between them ? A 



84 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

manager has great opportunities of influence 
through much intercourse with the members, 
and he can use it well or badly. Many man- 
agers of co-operative stores are first-rate men, 
and zealous Co-operators. Yet there are great 
temptations to managers to aim at personal 
power rather than the general welfare of the 
society. 

Checks on Managers. — Some societies are 
content with a guarantee or deposit similar to 
that demanded from the secretary or treasurer. 
Such a guarantee merely provides against cer- 
tain kinds of dishonesty. It does not provide 
against waste. 

(a) The English shops have advanced so far in 
their system that they provide for what they call 
Leakage Bonds. To aim at lessening waste 
and preventing possible fraud, many societies 
arrange for a leakage bond or agreement, to be 
signed by the manager. In this he binds him- 
self to return as much money as is equal to the 
value of the goods intrusted to him, subject to 
a deduction for leakage (i.e., waste and loss in 
weighing out). Opinions differ as to the leak- 
age allowable, and it depends partly on how the 
accounts are made up ; 2d or ^d in the pound 
is a very ordinary average allowance. 

(b) Check Systems. — There are many ways in 
which a fraudulent manager or shopkeeper can 



THE STORE. 85 

cheat a society, and no methods can obviate this 
altogether. At the same time it is very impor- 
tant that in order to remove temptation, and 
keep the business up to the mark, there should 
be a check system, with a view to seeing how much 
cash really passes through the manager's hands. 

Let it be understood that the mere having of 
checks or tokens, metal or otherwise, as explained 
before, to enable members to claim their divi- 
dends at the end of the quarter, is not a check 
system in the sense of being a check upon mana- 
gers and shopmen. You may or must have 
checks, as they are called, to give to members ; 
but it does not follow that you have any check 
on your manager, or that the committee know 
whether they get all the cash which is paid over 
the counter. For instance, non-members who 
know nothing about the dividend may come in, 
(but add) pay, and go away without any check, 
the shopman pocketing the money and not being 
found out. It has been found also that with the 
metal checks employees may pilfer the checks, 
and their friends bring them in and claim divi- 
dends at the end of the quarter. With the paper 
checks, one being given for every sale, there is 
some security, but even this has not always 
worked well. 

In large stores, the method of the shopmen 
giving the customer a ticket, who takes it to a 



86 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

boy, who gives metal checks in exchange and 
registers each shopman's sales, has been found 
fairly satisfactory. For the whole subject, which 
is a difficult one, see Manual of Checks, pub- 
lished by the Central Board. Apparently, the 
ideal check system has yet to be discovered. 
Still, it may be said generally that a good com- 
mittee can soon find out if a manager is doing 
really well or not, and that, as in so many other 
matters of management, the only thing to be 
done may be to say to a manager, " We do not 
charge you with dishonesty, but simply with 
want of managing power. Experience shows 
every day in every kind of business, that, of two 
men with the best intentions, one can make a 
good profit and the other will make a serious 
loss. We have given you a good trial, and tried 
to help you. We propose to part with you and 
take another manager." 

The Employees. — The shopmen, baker's men 
with the cart, and others employed by the store, 
will be appointed by the committee, who, if they 
are wise, will give their managers and branch 
managers a good deal of power in this matter. 
Get good managers, and trust them in minor 
matters ; give them power over those below 
them, if you think they will use it well ; and 
while always willing to investigate complaints, 
show the employees that you do trust your man- 



THE STORE. 8? 

ager. If the committee as individuals listen to 
the complaints of shopmen, clerks and others, 
they may do a great deal of harm. Branch 
managers should be made as far as possible re- 
sponsible for what goes on at the branches, and, 
if possible, should have a pecuniary interest in 
the success of the branch. 

Bonus to Employees. — Many societies have 
begun this plan, and under pressure from their 
members have given it up. It may fairly be 
said that, if Co-operators believe in the principle 
of workmen having a pecuniary interest in their 
work, they ought to apply it to the shopmen in 
their shops. Many Co-operators show by their 
votes in meetings and by their practice that they 
do not believe in this principle. On the other 
hand, many do. Some committeemen would 
gladly apply the principle if they could prove to 
their members that a real saving is effected by 
it. If it is to be conceded as an abstract prin- 
ciple of justice, not many societies will carry it 
on that ground. It is worth considering, whether 
the plan, which has been tried in some societies, 
of giving a bonus on wages, at the same rate as 
the dividend declared — e.g., is 6d to -$s in 
the pound, according to the success of trade in 
each quarter, is not a mistake, except in very 
small stores. Rather it would seem that each 
small group of employees should be made to feel 



88 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

a direct personal interest in the part or branch 
in which they are engaged. Then they have 
much more chance of getting something by 
their efforts, than they have as individuals of 
raising the general dividend for the whole store 
id or 2d in the pound, which will bring them 
but little after all. Where departmental accounts 
are kept, it ought not to be difficult. If societies 
and committees would turn their attention more 
fully to this subject, and not listen to isolated 
instances of failure, it is probable they would 
find that there is a good deal more in this mat- 
ter of profit-sharing by employees than has yet 
been found out. The number of employees em- 
ployed in distributive work in stores is about 
13,000. Almost all societies close the store for 
one half-holiday in the week, generally not on 
Saturdays. In addition to this unusual priv- 
ilege, the hours of labor are usually considerably 
less than the hours in private shops. The Sat- 
urday half -holiday for shops was largely inaugu- 
rated by Co-operators. They felt that shop- 
keepers had as much right to the holiday as 
they had. For rules for shopmen, see a useful 
paper at the end of Model Book-keeping. 

Average Working Expenses. — These vary a 
good deal : in some stores, they are as high as 
seven and one-half per cent or more, in some be- 
low five per cent ; but a great deal depends on 



THE STORE. 89 

local circumstances. It is impossible to lay down 
a rule. Inquiries should be made of societies in 
similar circumstances. 

Stock-taking. — Quarterly stock-taking (or 
half-yearly, where the accounts are only made 
up and dividends declared half-yearly) is a most 
important matter, and it may become a fruitful 
source, not only of error but of fraud. It must 
be done on a systematic principle, and the mem- 
bers of committees should personally superin- 
tend it. Stock ought to be taken at cost price, 
unless the goods are deteriorated, or the market 
value has gone down. In that case, they should 
be taken at what they would cost to buy at the 
time stock is taken. In no case ought goods to 
be put at more than cost price. To do so is to 
appropriate the profits before the work of selling 
has been done, and the expense of selling pro- 
vided for. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE ENTERPRISER. 

I ASKED Mr. Spinner one day, with a good 
deal of curiosity, in what consisted the dif- 
ference between their plan and other arrange- 
ments of co-operative workmen. I had always 
been taught, at college, and by the superficial 
writers on modern social order, that, while dif- 
ferent nations had had different forms of success 
in Co-operation, no one could yet claim that 
success in co-operative manufacture which he 
felt sure the Hampton plan had secured. 

It is generally said that the co-operative sys- 
tem of house-owning which in America is called 
the Philadelphia system, by which a Philadelphia 
workman comes to own the house he lives in, is 
peculiar to America. 

It is generally said that the co-operative sys- 
tem of savings banks, — as it was discussed by 
Mr. Scheffer, — in which the small depositors 
are themselves the capitalists who lend to the 
small borrowers, is a system peculiar to Ger- 
many. 

It is said also that the Rochdale system, the 



THE ENTERPRISER. 9 1 

system of co-operative buying and selling, as it 
has been described in the chapter above, called 
"The Store," has succeeded in England, and 
nowhere else. And it is popularly said by the 
general writers on this subject that co-opera- 
tive experiments in manufacturing have been 
short-lived, or have been on too small a scale 
to be of much account in the great exigencies of 
modern commerce. 

Mr. Spinner replied by saying that there are a 
good many large exceptions to the statement 
that co-operative industry has not succeeded 
on a large scale. The fishing industry in Great 
Britain, in France, and in America, has always 
been conducted on this principle. The men 
who go on the voyage divide the profits of the 
voyage by a scale determined long ago, — in 
which the master's rate differs from the mate's, 
his from the expert seaman, and his from the 
novice or the boy. The great cheese-factories 
of the dairy towns are conducted very largely 
on this principle. The farmer who sends in 
only a gallon of milk a day is a shareholder 
in the enterprise of the year, and receives his 
proportional dividend as regularly as if he fur- 
nished half the milk needed for the enterprise. 
The difficulty comes, unquestionably, — this was 
Mr. Spinner's theory, — when the kind of manu- 
facturing is such as to require a large invest- 



92 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ment of capital. In the cheese-factory the raw 
material is the principal charge. In the fish- 
eries the daily labor is the principal charge. 
But the factory requires a much larger plant, 
in proportion, than either fishery or cheese- 
factory. 

This difficulty had been met by the Co-opera- 
tors at Hampton when they agreed with Mr. 
Nourse to pay him a regular interest on the 
capital he furnished for this purpose. 

But even then the Co-operators in manufac- 
ture meet a second difficulty. They are trained 
to make goods. But they may make as well as 
Aladdin's genii, — and this will be of no use, if 
they cannot sell. More than this, — it is of no 
use to make well unless you can buy the mate- 
rial cheaply and to advantage. It is clear 
enough that a man who is weaving cloth can- 
not be buying wool, — perhaps a thousand miles 
away, — nor selling cloth, after it is made. 
The workman who spins and weaves and dyes 
is another person, in another business, from 
the manager who has to buy wool in one mar- 
ket and to sell cloth in another. And, if the 
workman has to be dependent upon some com- 
mission merchant who undertakes for him either 
of these duties or both, he is in as uncomforta- 
ble a position as when he was dependent upon 
the capitalist. In practice, in the ordinary sys- 



THE ENTERPRISER. 93 

tern, the capitalist undertakes this middleman's 
affair. He buys the wool and sells the cloth, — 
if the enterprise is like that at Hampton. 

But there is no reason, in the nature of 
things, why a capitalist should know how 
to buy wool or sell cloth any better than the 
weaver or spinner. It is a business wholly 
distinct from the business of lending money. 
And in point of fact, the failures of manufac- 
turers come in quite as often, because the men 
who have this part in charge do not carry on 
their business well, as because the goods are 
not up to their standard when the workmen 
have failed in their duty. 

"It is here," said Mr. Spinner, "that you find 
the distinctive part of our system. Nourse fur- 
nishes the money. We pay him for it, — as we 
would pay any bank for money which we needed. 
The workmen make the goods. We pay them 
for their day's work, exactly as you would pay 
the painter who painted your house. But 
thirdly, we make a separate business of con- 
triving the work, determining on the patterns 
and plans, buying the material, selling the 
goods. 

" This is not the affair of the workman. He 
does not know how. 

"It is not the affair of the capitalist. He 
does not know how. 



94 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

" In our plan it devolves on Mr. Workman and 
myself. We think we know how. We try to 
learn how. And the whole thing will go to de- 
struction if we do not know how. In point of 
historical fact, there would be no mill here on 
this basis, if we had not made the negotiation 
with Mr. Nourse, and made him believe it pos- 
sible. The old workmen and their wives know 
this ; and the hands generally understand it. 
In practice it is so clear that ' managing,' — 
buying, selling, contriving, — are different oper- 
ations from spinning, weaving, and dyeing, that 
the thing explains itself, so soon as men look 
into it. 

"Very well. As I explained to you, we are 
recognized as interested to the amount of one- 
third on the success of the concern. That 
is a rough average, probably not quite accu- 
rate, but nearly so, — and convenient. We are 
paid living wages, — as if we were foremen of 
rooms perhaps, head-dyers, or whatever. But, 
when the yearly balance is made up, what- 
ever the profit is, Nourse receives one-third of 
that profit, the workmen receive a third, — 
just in proportion to their wages, — and we 
receive a third. If we were paid in propor- 
tion to our wages only, we should not receive 
so much. But you see, that is as broad as it is 
long. If we were not to have this fixed share, 






THE ENTERPRISER. 95 

— one-third of the profit, — we should never 
undertake the management of the affair. Why 
should we ? I am as good a master-weaver as 
the head of either of our weaving-rooms. Why 
should I undertake all this business of buying, 
selling, planning, and in general ordering, if I 
am not to be paid for it ? " 

Thus Mr. Spinner made me understand that 
the failure of most co-operative enterprises has 
resulted from the badness of the general man- 
agement. This has resulted from the unwilling- 
ness to pay the general manager. The natural 
suggestion is that capital shall have half the 
profit and the workingman half. This is not 
founded on any fixed law, but it seems to be a 
convenient and easy division. It does not work. 
The reason is that there is a third and wholly dis- 
tinct business involved. This is management. 
It means buying and selling, planning, directing, 
selecting, enlarging work or reducing it. It re- 
quires a different training and a different use of 
time from the others. 

Spinner showed me figures, which he had 
drawn out very carefully from the books of 
some of the largest American establishments 
and from those of some of the smallest. He had 
drawn them off very carefully in tables. They 
showed what proportion of the gross earnings of 
these mills, year in and out, went for the work- 



g6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

men, what proportion went for material, what 
proportion went for the profits of the owners, 
and what was the interest on the capital at the 
market rates for the year. Of course, one year 
varied from another. One figure was up and 
another down, as the market for wool varied, or 
that for cloth, or that for money, or that for 
work. But, on the whole, in the average, it was 
curious to see that his rough division into thirds 
came out about fairly. To give to handiwork 
one-third the profit, to management one-third, 
and to capital one-third, after each had been paid 
the minimum of its living rate, was evidently an 
arrangement almost exactly just. One year with 
another, you could hardly do better. 

" In a word," he said to me once and again, 
" co-operative enterprises generally fail because 
they do not pay the management." 



I said to him one day, that he had made this 
sufficiently clear to me. Most business men 
would accept the statement as quite central, 
that the managers of an enterprise must be well 
paid or they will fail. Authors, for instance, do 
not find it well to print and sell their own books. 
They find it better to write them, and delegate 
the printing and sale of them to other men who 
make that their business. The money which 



THE ENTERPRISER. 97 

the author receives for his part of the work is 
pretty generally agreed upon. In America, it is 
ordinarily ten per cent of the gross sales at retail 
prices. The profit of the retail dealer is also 
generally agreed upon. It is forty per cent of 
the retail prices of the books he sells. There is 
left, then, to the wholesale publisher, the printer 
and the binder, to the freight companies which 
carry the book from place to place, and to the 
newspapers and magazines which advertise it, 
fifty per cent of the gross sales. This rough 
statement shows that in the business of the 
manufacture and sale of books a very large part 
of any profit is paid to management. The pro- 
portion will differ, of course, in different sorts 
of adventure. If I manufacture plain sheetings, 
I make an article for which there is a steady 
demand. The risk of putting it on the market 
is less than if it were a volume of sonnets or a 
novel. But, on the whole, men find that it is 
better to intrust the sale of their work to people 
who are used to that business, and to pay them 
well for it. An author may print his own book, 
or pay the printer for doing so. But he will be 
apt to have a very large pile of his own books in 
his own attic or cellar. In the long run, he will 
find it best to pay for the oversight of publishing. 
I said to Mr. Spinner that I could well see 
that men acquainted with general business 



98 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

should recognize the truth of his maxim, that 
you must pay well for management. But I said 
I should not think that when the day for the 
dividend came the workmen would like it. I 
should think they would be jealous of that part 
of the plan. 

He replied rather grimly, as if I had hit a 
spot which it was disagreeable to him to talk 
about. I have observed that visitors who are 
not quite at home with their hosts are a little 
apt to bring up the most delicate questions, as 
if the solution could be given in an epigram. 
Thus, in old times, an English traveller would 
ask a Southern planter if he thought the system 
of slavery abstractly just ; and an American 
clergyman to-day will ask an English bishop 
why he does not prevent the sale of clerical pre- 
ferments. In somewhat this way, — inoppor- 
tune, I will confess, — I asked Mr. Spinner 
whether the work-people liked the arrangement 
by which "Management " took one-third of the 
profit. I saw in a moment that it was a matter 
a good deal discussed, and that the renewal of 
the discussion with a novice annoyed him. I 
could not help that, however, and, in truth, I 
did not much care. I was there, not to enter 
tain him, but to find, if I could, what was their 
solution of the problems of capital and the in- 
dustry it needed ; — or, if you please, of industry 



THE ENTERPRISER. 99 

and the capital it needed. Mr. Spinner had 
said, again and again, that the essential part of 
their system was the distinct recognition of the 
value of the management. I did not understand 
the system, — that was very clear, — until I 
knew whether the workmen liked the theory as 
well as he did, who was himself a manager. 

His mere manner was enough to show that 
this was familiar ground to him, which he had had 
to go over till he was tired, with every new in- 
quirer. Very well ; I could not help that. Of 
course it was to be often explained, if it was the 
distinctive part of their system. 

He asked pardon, however, for the annoyance 
on his face, which he saw that I observed. Then 
he really laughed at himself. " It is ground so 
familiar to me," he said, " that I forget that it is 
new to others, — as the ticket-master forgets 
that the woman who asks him questions to-day 
is not the same woman who asked them yester- 
day. 

" I do not think the ' old men,' as we call 
them, though most of them are not forty, ever 
have any question about this part of the plan. 
Indeed, they know, as well as I do, that it is es- 
sential. They know that none of them or any 
of us would be here, unless the managers had 
laid out the system. As I said, they know, as a 
fact in history, that Workman and I persuaded 



100 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Nourse to come into the plan. They know, 
also, that we are the people whom he looks to, 
— that he deals with us, as far as there is any 
dealing between him and the concern, — so that 
we are a necessity. What is more, however, 
they know that, in fact, the thing works well, — 
that they receive, on the whole, much higher 
wages than they ever had before they came 
here, — that the work of the mill is better than 
it was in old times, and the reputation of our 
goods higher in the market. They know that 
we work with less waste and more profit, be- 
cause we are working on this general plan. So 
far, good. And so far as those who began with 
us go, there is never any discussion. 

"But you are quite right in thinking that 
new-comers, who have not worked with us 
long, invariably question this part of our ar- 
rangement at first. They say that Workman 
and I have the lion's share. The boys caricature 
us sometimes, well ; even the older ones will 
fling at us in the club meetings and other dis- 
cussions. Of course there have been a thousand 
other plans proposed. Of course, any hand new 
at the bellows thinks he can blow better than 
the old hand did, and makes his new suggestion. 
It generally amounts to this, of course, — that a 
considerable sum would be saved to the work- 
men themselves if a committee of management 



THE ENTERPRISER. IOI 

of their own superintended the work, as Work- 
man and I do now ; — if a fixed allowance were 
made to them for their compensation, and then 
the whole profit were divided in proportion to 
the wages. I do not see that they are apt to 
wish to increase Nourse's share. 

" But I ask nothing better than that a critic 
shall have to put his plan on paper, and make it 
popular with the rest. Observe, there is no an- 
nual meeting where it can be proposed as a 
practical scheme. Every one knows that these 
works are not run by caucus or in town-meeting. 
No one is here long who does not like to be here. 
And, unless the man likes to come, and take 
wages at our rates, he does not come. Still, 
the whole scheme is certainly democratic, and 
rests on the substantial satisfaction of every- 
body. Naturally, it attracts more than an aver- 
age share of theorizers or schemers. So that in 
any debating-club, as at the Union, it is very 
likely that an Ideal Plan for its improvement 
shall be brought forward. And in this country, 
particularly when times are bad, there will be a 
plenty of broken-winded flannel mills, or other con- 
cerns which have shut down, where the owners 
are open to offers to buy cheap. There was a 
young man here, named Crichton, who wanted 
to persuade some of the other young fellows to 
go up to Eden, twenty miles up the river, with 



102 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

him, and work out a plan he had. So, in one 
way or another, we have had plenty of plans for 
improving on our method of sharing. 

"This is the reason why I say so confidently 
that the making an equal allowance to ' Manage- 
ment ' has proved necessary : — I mean an al- 
lowance of profit, equal to that assigned to Work 
and to Capital. It has proved necessary, be- 
cause so many of these other plans have been 
proved inefficient. The men will not trust them- 
selves and their families to an annual caucus. 
They will not go into a scheme which may be 
over-set in a minute. And capital will not trust 
itself, unless there is somebody to trust itself to. 
Theo. Brown used to say that when you made a 
stocking, you could not 'make believe' round 
once, and then knit into the 'make believe.' 
There must be something to knit into. In prac- 
tice, there must be a management, which may 
contract with the men and compact with the 
property owner." 

I said that it was the fate of middlemen to 
be unpopular. Spinner said that I need not tell 
him that. But he said that that was one thing 
which they were for ; that some one must stand 
the brunt ; and that, if he and Workman were 
honest and impartial, and carried open accounts, 
which every one might see, he would risk any 
unpopularity. 



THE ENTERPRISER. 103 

" In truth," he said, "with every year there 
is less and less of such complaining or such criti- 
cism as you inquire about. The scheme rests on 
its substantial justice. When you buy a piece of 
meat in the market, or hire a cab at the Forty- 
Second Street Station, you do not complain be- 
cause the butcher makes a profit, or the cab- 
driver. You do not suppose that either of them 
is there as a philanthropist, and you do not sug- 
gest to them that they shall send you a check on 
Christmas Day, with your share of the profits of 
the year. You recognize butchering and cab- 
driving as a different business from your business, 
and you do not ask to share the cab-driver's prof- 
its, more than you expect him to share yours. 
You do share profits in a Mutual Insurance Com- 
pany, for there you are all in the same enterprise, 
and you succeed or fail under the same laws. 
And so, in the spinning and weaving, we are all 
in the same business, and gain or lose by the 
same laws. But, as I said in the beginning, two 
things are sure. i. Management is a separate 
profession, which must be well paid. And 2. 
Management involves permanence, or there will 
be no confidence or security. 

"I have told you," said he, "of the criticisms. 
Now let me tell you a story on the other side. 
When, in October two years since, the money 
market tightened up as it did, half a dozen large 



104 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

mill-owners chose to fail, and there was what 
you might call a special panic in the trade in 
woollens, besides the general panic on Wall 
Street, which is apt to come round in the autumn. 
As it happened, we were carrying an unusually 
large stock of goods, which I did not choose to 
sacrifice at a time when the market was badly 
depressed. But we wanted money, — we wanted 
it badly. In ordinary times, I could have had 
it for the asking, at one of the three or four 
banks where they knew our paper. But they 
would not look at me then, and, — well, I do not 
like to go to note shavers. Now there is very 
little secrecy among us managers here. And 
when I came home pretty blue, one Saturday 
night, it was known quite soon Monday morning 
what was the matter with me. Then it was that 
the system was tested, Mr. Freeman. One of 
those very men who had said the hardest things 
of me not a year before, — you know the man, 
he is that man Woodruff, whose son you took 
a-fishing, — came round to me on Monday night. 
He told me that they had been putting their 
heads together, and comparing their bank-books, 
and that, if I thought twelve thousand dollars 
would be of any use to me the next Saturday, 
they could manage that I could have it, and as 
much more at the end of the month. And more 
than this ; he said if we were pinched for money, 



THE ENTERPRISER. IO5 

as he thought we should be likely to be, he had 
a list, which he gave me, of forty-seven of the 
best hands he had, who would not draw their 
wages for four or five weeks from that time. 
Well, long before his five weeks were up, I had 
sold my goods at very handsome prices, and I 
was able to address them a circular note, to 
thank them for their loyalty." 

Spinner told this pretty story with a good deal 
of pride. He opened his desk, and took out a 
copy of his circular note, handsomely printed, 
and gave it to me. It was in these words : — 

"Office of the Hampton Mills. 

" On behalf of the management of the mills, 
and of Mr. Nourse, who is absent in the Holy 
Land, the undersigned wish to express their 
thanks as well as his for the loyalty, good sense 
and courage with which all parties have rendered 
efficient assistance to the Mills, in the late 
severe commercial crisis. 

" It may be true that, in the disorganized con- 
dition of trade and commerce, such panics or 
crises cannot be avoided. 

" But this is certain, that, with such good will 
and devotion to a common cause as have been 
shown by those who have undertaken the enter- 
prise of the Hampton Mills, the convulsions of 
the money-market are not to be greatly dreaded. 



106 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

We have had an opportunity to show each other, 
if we did not know it before, that there is 
strength in union. And such an experience 
as this of the last two months is enough to 
prove that our enterprise is on a solid foun- 
dation. 

"With new wishes to deserve the confidence 
and respect of our fellow- workmen, we are 
"Their friends, 

"William Spinner. 
"John Workman." 

"There was really nothing wonderful about 
it," said Spinner thoughtfully, when he saw that 
I had twice read his circular through. " No, — 
keep it. I gave it to you to keep. I have more 
copies here. 

" There was really nothing wonderful about it, 
if one will only remember who Jesus Christ was, 
and what he meant to set in motion, — nay, what 
he did set in motion. Mr. Freeman, if I could 
tell the ministers what to preach, I would have 
them, as often as once a month, show to people, 
especially young people, how practical, how effi- 
cient, — how business-like, if you please, — this 
gospel of our Lord is. There is apt to be so 
much rhetoric and poetry in preaching, that I 
am afraid young people think Christianity is all 
outside of life, — that it is matter of fancy or 



THE ENTERPRISER. 107 

imagination. Now, if I were a preacher, I 
should like nothing better than to show that 
the Saviour was the most practical reformer, as 
he was certainly the most successful reformer, 
not only in what they call in their sermons the 
affairs of Heaven, or the Heavenly Kingdom, 
but in what you or I or these young people 
would call ' Every-day life. ' 

"Did I ever tell you of what Mrs. Spinner 
said to a fine lady in Warburton yonder, who 
was troubled because she could not keep her 
servants ? " 

I said he never had. Mr. Spinner laughed. 
"Why," said he, "Nancy heard her long story 
about the troubles she had had ever since she 
began housekeeping, and then she said, 'Did 
you ever try the golden rule ? ' " 



CHAPTER VI. 

children's work. 

I NOTICED, on the first day when I went 
through the mills, that there were no little 
children at work in any department. There 
were a good many young people, whom I 
should call boys and girls, but they were, 
clearly enough, more than sixteen years old. 

I noticed, also, however, that there were no 
boys loafing about the village. After my first 
day's experience in seeking trout in the ponds 
above the town, I tried to find a boy who would 
go with me, to carry an extra basket I had, and, 
indeed, for companionship. And although, after 
a day or two, I secured the service of such a 
boy, — who became a valued friend before I 
left Hampton, — this was only after rather a 
careful negotiation, and on special terms, which, 
if this paper does not grow too long, I may 
have a chance to tell. 

I was talking one afternoon with a man 
named Holmes, whom I had fallen in with in 
the works, and of whom I have spoken once 
already, and I asked him particularly about 






CHILDREN S WORK. IO9 

what he thought of the labor or work of chil- 
dren, and what they did about it. He said 
that he did not know of any fixed rule in the 
matter, which would prevent Mr. Spinner from 
hiring many more children if he wished, or if 
he thought the work required it. " But," he 
said, with a good deal of emphasis, knocking 
the ashes from his pipe as a sort of gesture 
accompanying, "he does not think the work 
requires it, — and we do not think so, — I do 
not think so, — and the men generally do not." 
It was quite clear to my mind, as he spoke, 
that in the face of such unanimity of "the 
men " Mr. Spinner would not be apt to change 
his opinion. 

"You see, Mr. Freeman," said Holmes, "most 
of the men grew up in mills, — were trained in 
them themselves, — and they do not like it. I 
was in a mill in England, so young that I hardly 
remember anything before I went there. Well, 
there is no doubt that a boy picks up some- 
thing that way. He gets steady habits of 
work, I guess, and I guess there is a certain 
promptness, — readiness, — call it what you 
will, in good hands that have been trained so, 
that they would say came from their beginning 
early. But then, what is that ? I have plenty 
of men and women in this mill who never saw a 
loom till they were twenty years old, who are 



IIO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

just as prompt and just as steady. They did 
not get it in one way, so they got it in another. 

"To go back, Mr. Freeman, I do not think, 
on the whole, that men or women who grew 
up from childhood in a mill want to have their 
children grow up so, if they can help it. If they 
can help it, — that's where it is. Perhaps they 
think they cannot help it. Perhaps the whole 
business is counted so close, — I mean is car- 
ried on with so narrow a margin, — that the 
wages of the family only amount to enough to 
keep the family in bread and butter. But then, 
what does this mean ? I do not know how 
much you know of trade or manufacturing. I 
know that there is no such squeeze as that in 
the woollen business now, — nor has been for 
twenty years, — nor is like to be. No, indeed, 
Mr. Freeman ; and if there were any, I would 
give up making cloth, and I would go to Dakota 
and make wheat, or to Montana and make wool, 
— that's what I would do." 

And Mr. Holmes laughed as he thought of 
himself on a ranch in Montana. 

" You see," he continued, filling his pipe again, 
"you see, Mr. Freeman, there are a great many 
other things a boy has to learn, and a girl too, 
besides spinning and weaving, if they are to live 
decently and comfortably in such a country as 
America. And I do not mean school learning 



CHILDREN S WORK. 1 1 1 

either. That's all very well, but my children learn 
a good many things, and need to learn them, 
which Miss Jane Stevens does not teach them, 
nor any other schoolmistress or schoolmaster." 

I said that I believed he had a good many 
children. 

"Ten of my own," he said with some pride, 
"and Peter, who came in with the mail just now. 
He is just the same as one of ours, but he is 
really the cousin of the others, son of a brother 
of Mrs. Holmes, who was lost at sea. Eleven of 
them there are. I took Tom into my own room 
with me the day he was sixteen, — and I suppose 
I shall let Susie come in the day she is sixteen, if 
she wants to. But maybe she will change her 
mind before then." 

And he paused a minute, as if considering 
this question, before he went on in his rather 
voluble conversation. 

" I told them, when we came here," he then 
said, "that if we meant to have our children 
grow up strong men and women, they must be 
in the open air, they must have enough to eat 
and drink, and they must want to eat and drink 
it. You see, Mr. Freeman, it is my notion that 
all mill-towns have suffered from the idea that 
they are to be nothing but mill-towns. You 
say ' Lowell is a factory-town,' and ' Holyoke 
is a factory-town,' as if because they are fac- 



112 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

tory-towns, they can be nothing else. Suppose 
you made the people in a ship into one com- 
munity in this fashion. Suppose that when 
you launched her, you said to all the people 
that sailed her that they were to be sailors, or 
at sea, all their lives. Suppose you said so to 
their wives and children, — just like those peo- 
ple that live in the boats in Canton harbor. 
What sort of men, I wonder, would grow up 
on your ship ? After all, the mill is only a ship 
on land. And what I say is, that the boys and 
girls in it, even if they are, in the end, to work 
in it, want to see and learn and know some 
other things, just as the sailor's boys do be- 
fore they go out with him : — and, for that 
matter, his girls, who never go out with him. 

" Now it was easier for us to act on such a 
plan, because here, from the beginning, the men 
who owned this plant had the courage to say 
that they would earn their money in manufact- 
uring and in nothing else. For the rest of their 
investment they wanted interest and not profits. 
Perhaps you know how they gave up the store, 
and said they did not mean to try and make 
money out of that ; that was not their affair. 
So they gave up the tenements." 

I said that I did know this, and that I hoped 
to know more of the Co-operative System than 
I did when I came to Hampton. 



CHILDREN S WORK. II3 

"Well, now," he said, "the same rule works, 
of course, about rents and gardens, — houses, 
— about these places where we live. Of course, 
when a man like our Mr. Nourse buys a prop- 
erty like this, there is a temptation to see what 
the rents on the houses will be. It is natural to 
say ' they have always rented for ten per cent 
on the valuation or cost, and that will be but a 
very small rent,' — so he will go on so. There 
is no great oppression if he wants to do so. But 
I do not believe it pays in the long run. To be- 
gin with, I do not believe it pays any man to be 
in two or three different trades. If he makes 
horse-shoes, I say let him make horse-shoes, 
and not try to sell ribbons in the evenings. If 
a man makes woollen cloth, let him sell woollen 
cloth, and not have another account for the gro- 
cery shop, and another for the rents and repairs 
of his houses. That's the way it looks to me. 

" Anyway, as you know, these people, or 
rather, this man, were ready to let us do what we 
chose, if we only paid him the market interest 
on the capital, and gave him a third of the 
profits, if profits there were. 

" Now I, and Spinner, and Workman, — well, 
a good many of us, — we went in for Real Estate. 

"Real Estate, Mr. Freeman, with a large R 
and a large E, — a very large R, and a very large 
E. ' Fasten a man to the ground,' says I, ' and 



114 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

let it be worth his while to make it worth living 
on.' No, Mr. Freeman," — and he laughed, — "I 
spent a winter with the Cherokees once, at a 
place they call Tahlequah. I saw enough of com- 
mon property in land then and there, and I do 
not want to see any more. 'Real Estate,' says 
I. And when I said this to the others, I did 
not go back on what I have been saying to you. 
Because when I own a place, as I own this 
place," — and here Holmes looked up with a 
certain pride on his wife's trumpet vines and 
Dutchman's pipe, which shaded the piazza where 
we were sitting, — " when I owned this place, — 
when I bought it, — I did not buy it to make 
money. I make money yonder, — I make money 
by making cloth, — or helping make it. But I 
want a real home. I want it for her, and I want 
it for them. And so I said to Spinner and Work- 
man, says I, 'You let these boys and girls of 
mine live in a place I own, and we shall all take 
care of it. You put me in a tenement some- 
body else owns, — and for one I shall be apt to 
let somebody else take care of it.' So they fixed 
it, or all of us fixed it together. They gave me 
a bond for a deed of this place ; it was one acre 
then ; I have another acre back there now, and 
afterward I bought a wood-lot yonder. I was to 
pay five per cent interest, and ten per cent a 
year on the capital if I could, and I was to have 



CHILDREN S WORK. 1 1 5 

a deed when I had paid forty per cent. But, 
you know, after we were sure the thing would 
work here, it was not much money, and I drew 
out of the savings bank all I needed to pay up 
the whole. Yes, it is a pretty place. But it's 
a much prettier place than it was when we came 
here. And that is what I was coming at. If 
you do not mind, put on your hat, and come 
round with me." 

So we walked round his little domain. Yes ; 
a little domain, but his own. And he had all 
the pride in it, and had the right to, which my 
friend Mr. Coram has, when he takes me 
through his grape-houses and other forcing 
houses. He made me go into the large hen- 
house, and showed me what he could of the 
methods of the hatching house. But he said he 
must not interfere too far, or his wife and his 
girls would be after him. He told me with pride 
that, excepting three days' labor, when he hired 
a man to help in digging some post-holes, and 
in some other heavy work, every nail had been 
driven, every partition framed, and every sash 
fixed in its place by the handiwork of his boys. 
"Let them laugh at the Industrial School," said 
he, "that is what comes of it." Then I had to 
go through the back lot, which had been added 
to the other, and I was indeed surprised to see 
the show he had of pears, and to notice how sci- 



Il6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

entifically even the beds of vegetables had been 
trained. All the potatoes of the winter, all the 
celery, all the tomatoes of the summer, and all 
that Mrs. Holmes and her daughters would can, 
were the product of this garden. All the poul- 
try they ate, and all the eggs, came from this 
hen-house, and they raised enough to pay in 
simple barter for their milk, which came from a 
neighbor, who on a similar lot kept a cow, 
though he had to hire pasturage. We were still 
surveying the crops when the bell rang for tea. 
He asked me to take tea with them, and I was 
glad to do so. It gave me a chance to see the 
family, all the way down to the little curly- 
headed girl who sat in a high-chair, and kept 
the table clear for a small semicircle drawn 
from that centre. There was a younger boy in 
the cradle. 

The supper, physically speaking, did credit to 
Mrs. Holmes and to her daughters. This is not 
the place to describe that matter. Indeed, the 
rugged and hearty aspect of the children, who 
did thorough justice to their mother's provisions 
and previsions, was what interested me. There 
was no hurry at table, but " when hunger both 
and thirst were fully satisfied," we adjourned to 
the piazza again, and Holmes took up the line of 
his argument. 

" What I set out to say, when we went out into 



CHILDREN S WORK. 117 

the garden, was this. Suppose I granted to 
Adam Smith, and the other high-flyers, that La- 
bor, as they call it, by which they generally 
mean work, shall be divided to the bottom, if 
you want to make money. I do not grant it, 
but suppose I did. Suppose that every egg in 
the omelette you ate to-night had been bought 
in Michigan, as on Adam Smith's theory it 
would and should have been, in the cheapest mar- 
ket. Suppose even it was as fresh, coming from 
Michigan. Suppose that honey, which came 
from Betty's hive, had been brought from De- 
troit, and had cost a cent a pound less than it 
has cost me. Suppose every pear which was 
on that dish could have been bought in Went- 
worth market cheaper than the money it has 
cost us to keep up the orchard. Hark you, I 
do not grant one of these things, but suppose 
it was so, what am I for, Mr. Freeman ? What 
is Clarinda for ? What are we living for ? What 
is this house for, anyway ? Certainly it is that 
these children may grow up into strong and good 
and well men and women. In the long run, that 
is the thing I have most at heart, and Clarinda. 
Now let us suppose that since April my radishes 
and strawberries and raspberries and currants and 
peas and beans and corn and cauliflower and 
cabbages and potatoes have cost me a hundred 
dollars more than they would have cost me in 



Il8 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

the market, — what should I do with this hun- 
dred dollars ? Suppose I spent it, — as observe 
I have spent it, — on the education of these boys 
and girls who have worked on this garden, 
among other things. There are four of them. 
Where could I have got for one of them, for 
twenty-five dollars, what I have secured by keep- 
ing him at work under my eye or his mother's ? 

"But Adam Smith, or even Robert Owen, 
might tell me that if the older boys and girls 
were in the factory I should have twelve or even 
fourteen dollars a week more on the pay-roll 
every Saturday, and that that goes a great way 
toward Clarinda's account at the store for flour 
and butter and meat and shirts and trousers and 
coats and bonnets and gowns, and above all, for 
shoes," — and here he laughed at his own enu- 
meration of man's requisites. 

"There is no doubt of that. And I do not 
mean to say that eleven hearty children, — for 
Peter is all the same as our own, — eat nothing. 
Eleven children like these, Mr. Freeman, eat in a 
year well-nigh seven barrels of flour, and other 
things in proportion. Let 'em, says I, — the 
more they shall have. . And I do not pretend 
that my farm here, as a machine for producing 
nitrogen and phosphates out of the rain and the 
sun, compares with, the machines out in Dakota 
which do the same thing. But I do claim, as the 



CHILDREN S WORK. II9 

patent lawyers say, that, as a machine for training 
boys and girls into men and women, it is much 
simpler and much better adapted to the purpose 
than the complex machine by which Peter works 
at a loom and earns money to send to Dakota 
and buy wheat. You see what I mean." 

Yes, I did see very well, and I was glad he had 
worked it out for himself so well. He wanted 
to show me his figures, and to please him I looked 
at them. But I do not copy them here, though 
I could, because the reader would incredulously 
think they had been doctored. The truth is, 
however, that such a spot as Holmes owned, if 
manured by the foot of the owner, as John Ran- 
dolph said, becomes more productive than the 
outsiders think. It was not difficult, in a place 
like that, to procure the stimulants they wanted 
for their garden-beds. They had only too much 
working force, when they needed to plant and 
to weed ; and the harvesting, as Holmes said, 
laughing, took care of itself, when the family 
was to eat the strawberries. The secret of suc- 
cess, if one spoke of the theory of the thing, was 
that this very, evanescent force which we call la- 
bor could be applied at any moment when it 
was wanted, without contract, without wages, 
without book-keeping ; and something came of 
it. What came of it I had seen in the eggs and 
milk and cream and honey and stewed pears on 



120 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

the tea-table, and had heard of in the potatoes 
and other vegetables of which he had told me. 

As to money earnings from the children, 
Holmes told me what hardly surprised me. He 
said that all up and down the valley, within 
three miles of him on either side, the farmers, 
real farmers, would hire his boys for quite as 
much as the woollen mills would pay them, at 
several points between April and November, 
and that he had rather let them go to such 
work, for a week or two at a time, than keep 
them in the mills. "That is what we gain," 
said he, " by building up these truck farms, as, 
in fact, our whole system of manufacture does. 
Somebody must raise the milk and poultry and 
vegetables for the people at work, not only here, 
but at Wentworth and at every mill along this 
stream. You cannot import all that food as 
readily as you can flour and beef. And it ends 
in a set of farms, — well, you Western men 
would not call them farms, but we do, — which 
supply these needs. Now there are times when 
these farmers need extra work, and a good deal 
of it, and then comes the chance for my boys. 
So they learn two trades, — and that is what 
every man ought to do. Who is it that says 
every man must have a vocation and an avoca- 
tion ? " 

" But you do not make Mr. Freeman under- 



CHILDREN S WORK. 121 

stand the real secret of success," said Mrs. 
Holmes, " unless you tell him that we own this 
place, and do not hire it." 

" Oh, I told him that," said her husband, " in 
my long lecture to him before tea." 

She said that she could illustrate the distinc- 
tion by telling me one thing. " Here is this vine, 
which you call so pretty, which is indeed the 
glory of the front of the house. When we came 
here, this piazza was as bare and ugly as any 
which would be found in New England. Now, if 
we had hired the house, I should have spent 
twenty-five cents for five papers of seeds. I 
should have bought morning-glories, and cypress- 
vine, and what they call cucumber-vine, and cobcea, 
and perhaps some scarlet runners. You see I 
should have wanted to cover the front as quickly 
as I could. Instead of this, so soon as I knew I 
was to stay here, I sent to Mr. Misho's for this 
one root of Dutchman's pipe, and paid my quarter 
of a dollar for that. That was years ago. But 
my piazza is more and more comfortable every 
summer, with no cost to anybody, while all my 
morning-glories, and annuals would have been 
cut down by the first hard frost. I should have 
saved my seeds, but I should have had to begin 
again every year." 

Her husband listened, with a sort of pride for 
the exact fitness of the parable, and said that 



122 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

that instance did tell the whole story. "And 
Clarinda isn't selfish," he said, laughing ; " she 
isn't half so selfish as the rest of us are. She 
would simply be doing her duty in buying her 
annuals. For, if she lived in a hired house, of 
course it would be her duty to make it look 
pretty as soon as she could, — in six hours, if 
she could, or, if not so, in six weeks. For my 
part, when she sent for her Dutchman, I sent 
for a Catawba vine. I bought a wheelbarrow 
load of leather clippings from old Soule around 
the corner, and treated my land with them. 
Step round and see the vine with me," he said. 
"I feed it with waste from the butcher's four 
times every summer, and now look there." 

He pointed up with pride to the magnificent 
clusters of grapes, such clusters as civilized man 
has always taken as the noblest type of plenty 
and luxury. "There," said Holmes, "who does 
better than that ? In theory, you know, I ought 
to send to Ohio or New York for those, and pay 
for them in our goods. But, once in a while, I 
am not sorry to upset Adam Smith in a good 
exception. My boys made all that trellis, they 
will pick all the grapes, and they will eat most 
of them ; there are nearly two hundred clusters 
in all. But, after all, these are only the orna- 
ments. The real breadwinner of the place is 
the hennery yonder, with its machinery for 



CHILDREN S WORK. 1 23 

hatching out the little chicks." And so we re- 
turned to the piazza. 

Then there followed a long conversation 
which I will not try to repeat. Holmes insisted 
that the sunshine and rain on a man's place was 
a part of his wealth, which he must invest if he 
could. Then he said that the muscle and 
strength and skill of the children was another 
part of a man's wealth, which must be used, if 
they were not hurt in the using. But then he 
fell into a more serious vein. 

" I will not pretend, Mr. Freeman, that these 
profit and loss reasons are the real reasons why 
I bring up my children so. These are only my 
justifications after the fact, as the lawyers would 
say. You are a Christian man, I hope, and I 
try to be another. I can say to you, then, what 
perhaps I would not say at the street corner, — ■ 
that I want these children of mine to grow up 
as children of God ; sure of His presence, and 
happy in His love. I have a notion that if they 
are in the open air, they feel His presence, and 
see His work ; that He seems near to them, and 
they feel near to Him. Anyway, they are with 
their mother more, and that is the best thing 
that can happen to them, for we do not have 
our children any too long. And if, in this open- 
air life, healthy and free, they do grow up happy 
and good, why, that is the whole thing. You 



124 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

and I must not be counting coppers or adding 
up columns of figures, to find out whether one 
plan is better than another. If it is better for 
them, that is all." 

And as we went into the house, after I had 
bidden good by to his wife and the older chil- 
dren, he said, with a good deal of feeling, " It 
troubles me a good deal that the men who make 
laws, and the men who write books, speak as if 
they thought that a little more profit or a lit- 
tle more product was the important thing. Of 
course they do not think so. Of course every 
one wants more life, — health instead of sick- 
ness, happiness instead of misery, strength 
instead of weakness. A Christian state cares for 
its people, and does not care, except for them, 
for its things." 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE SCHOOL. 

I REMINDED Spinner one day that he had 
promised to show me something of the school 
arrangements, and he said that if I were willing 
to take a walk, we would both go down to the 
school-house, and stop on our way to find Miss 
Stevens, who was their teacher at that moment, 
and had been for more than a year. We found 
an intelligent, wide-awake woman, perhaps thirty- 
five years old, with a little of the firmness and 
regularity which comes on people who have kept 
a school for seventeen years, interested in her 
work, and willing to talk about it. She said she 
would take her keys with her, and show us the 
school-house, though there was, on the whole, 
very little to show. 

They were District 13 in a large township, 
and the general school-committee of the town 
had found it was well to let them carry on things 
after a rather exceptional way. The ^ district 
committee in New England has very large powers, 
and does very much as it chooses, and particu- 
larly if one member of the district committee 



126 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

t 

is a member of the general town committee, the 
town committee does not much interfere with 
the plans of the district, so only the work required 
under the statute of the state is done. There 
is no general law as to hours, there is no general 
law as to the number of weeks which the school 
shall be kept open ; all the law requires is that 
there shall be a school every winter and a school 
every summer, with a certain minimum beneath 
which no district must fall, or indeed would be 
permitted to fall, in the general state of public 
opinion. These people at Hampton more than 
complied with the letter of the law, and Miss 
Stevens assured me that their results were quite 
as satisfactory as she had found in places where 
the schools were kept on a more conventional 
footing. 

The school-house was the old school-house 
which they had found there, — a perfectly sim- 
ple building, which might have cost a couple of 
hundred dollars to build, with one large room 
only, and a little anteroom, in which the boys 
and girls hung up their coats and cloaks, and 
where they left their overshoes. But I noticed 
that she or somebody had ornamented it prettily 
with chromos and other pictures ; they had a very 
good set of school maps hanging upon the walls, 
and the general aspect of the place was cheerful. 
I also noticed that the platform at the farther 



THE SCHOOL. 127 

end of the room was rather higher than I should 
have made it. But I asked no questions, knowing 
that "the dumb man's borders still increase." 

Miss Stevens said that she had very little to 
explain, and, indeed, very little to show. She 
took me to the end of the room opposite the 
platform, and threw open a half closet, half cup- 
board, which was there, and I saw in a moment 
that it was a sort of alcove, in which they had 
stored a great many books, — I should think 
more than a thousand. This, she said, was the 
school library ; or, if I choose to call it so, a pub- 
lic library. Mr. Spinner would tell me where 
they got the money for it, and who had the 
books. Then she said, laughing, that she was 
not only the schoolmistress, but she was libra- 
rian of the library. She opened another closet, 
and there I saw were crowded in two or three 
tables, which, she told me, were the reading- 
room tables ; and she explained to me how they 
could be brought out, and arranged so as to cover 
up the desks of her school-children, and serve 
her for a reading-room in the evening of some 
of the winter months, when the schoolroom was 
open for the purpose. "The school-house has 
to 'pay a double debt,' " she said ; "and it is now 
opera house, now schoolroom, now library, and 
now reading-room. I am retained by these gen- 
tlemen in the four capacities of mistress of amuse- 



128 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ments, director of reading, librarian, and school- 
mistress. One of your wise men says that every 
one should have a vocation and an avocation and 
a 'third.' I not only have a third, but I have a 
fourth. But, as another wise man says, I make 
one hand wash another, and really the boys and 
girls are very good assistants. There is nothing 
a bright boy likes better than to be told that he 
may help in the library, and there is nothing 
that gives him more self-respect than to be put 
upon some committee in charge of the news- 
papers or magazines in the reading-room." 

I listened, well pleased, for the little woman 
was now talking to me on what is rather a favora- 
ble topic of my own, and I began asking her a 
librarian's questions, and other questions which 
would hardly occur to a person who had not had 
in hand a set of duties which I have had half my 
life, but which, with the reader, need not be 
spoken of. I found that she was in no sort 
above her business ; on the other hand, she was 
well disposed to magnify her office, and she gave 
me some very good hints in administration. 
But as to the sinews of war, as to the way in 
which the money was collected and disbursed 
which all these various enterprises demanded, 
she always referred me to Mr. Spinner. 

"But if your heart is in it," she said, "and if 
the people you work for are sympathetic, as the 



THE SCHOOL. 1 29 

people are for whom I work, the thing does not 
require a v > much money as people imagine, or as 
it requires on paper; — no, not nearly as much 
as it requires when you work from above below, 
as I have seen such work done, when liberal 
people and generous people were condescending 
to improve and level up another kind of people. 
With us, nobody is condescending; we are, if 
you please, a little selfish. It very soon appears 
that it is easier to have one of Trollope's novels 
answer the purpose of twenty of us, or one or 
two copies of Harper s answer the purpose of a 
large circle of readers, than if everybody were 
selfishly keeping the book or the magazine at 
his own house and occasionally lending it. Very 
soon, after a year or two, the bound volumes of 
the magazines became books of the very first 
interest to children. All children like to follow 
up a series of bound magazines. They like it 
rather more than they like anything else. In- 
deed, Mr. Freeman, the difficult point with a 
public library is at the beginning. The old prov- 
erb is certainly true there. Somehow it hap- 
pens that the first five hundred books you buy 
are infallibly stupid books. They are the ' books 
which no gentleman's library should be with- 
out,' but which might as well be manufactured 
out of wood and leather, and nailed up perma- 
nently on the shelves. It is not until you have 



130 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

done with the 'standard books,' and begin to 
supply people with the every-day literature of 
the time, that they begin to understand that it 
is worth while to go to the library, and the time 
when they understand that it is worth while to 
support the library is even later. But when 
they have once tasted blood, there is nothing 
about which a community is so unanimous as it 
is in the support of its library. Here I make 
them bring me everything. I make the man 
who comes up on the train bring me the New 
York Herald or Tribune of that day, that I may 
have it on the table of my reading-room. We 
cannot afford to subscribe for half a dozen dailies. 
But really, there is not a night when one of my 
boys cannot pick up a daily at the station as 
the train passes us, or some one does not bring 
it in here. Our files would not be very uniform, 
but we are, all the same, supplied with some- 
thing, and if people read journals of half a dozen 
schools in politics, why, it is none the worse for 
them. In the same way, we have most of our 
magazines, — not all; some we subscribe for; 
but I encourage people to send their magazines 
to me as soon as they have done with them. I 
promise them that we will bind them, and, after 
a fashion, we do bind them, though you would 
think it is rather homely binding. I have taught 
the girls to do that. And the consequence of all 



THE SCHOOL. I3I 

this is, if you should come in here, after the first 
of October, or before the first of May, you would 
find, every evening, that my tables are out, that 
my periodicals are on the tables, and that this 
little room is quite as full as it will hold, of peo- 
ple who have come in here to read. Indeed, last 
year, I was obliged to establish a branch, of which 
Mr. Spinner will tell you, at the other end of the 
village, because we were overcrowded here." 

All this entertained me, because it fell in with 
various plans of my own, which had had more or 
less success in various localities. Then I asked 
her about the school hours, and the extent to 
which she carried her scholars. "As to that," 
replied Miss Jane Stevens, "the committee is 
good-natured, and leave me very much to my 
own devices. When I came here, I found that 
the school had been very small, and, in factj be- 
fore our mill was established, hardly anybody 
lived in these houses, and very few of those peo- 
ple who did live here had any children. I had 
kept school in factory villages before. The gen- 
eral object in most of them is to crowd the 
children through the thirteen weeks which are 
required by law, so that they may have the 
other nine months to work in the mills ; and the 
pressure of the parents on the committee, or, 
generally, of the directors of the mills, is the 
same way. Then we are a good deal pressed 



132 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

and embarrassed often, because the parents are 
very anxious to get our certificate that the chil- 
dren have worked through the thirteen weeks, 
and frequently they ask for the certificate before 
they have any right to it. Then, if you refuse 
the certificate, you get into hot water, and alien- 
ate that family, and perhaps their neighbors. 

" We have none of this difficulty here. Mr. 
Spinner will tell you how soon he and his 
friends determined that they would not have 
any children working in the mills who were not 
sixteen years old. I suppose that determination 
made them trouble, but it gave me great joy. I 
did not insist upon what you would call a city 
school. I was perfectly willing to fall into the 
habit of all the country districts here, in having 
only a winter school or a summer school ; al- 
though Mr. Spinner was kind enough," she said, 
nodding to him and smiling, "to let me have 
my own way in that regard. But I did say that 
I should like to have the school open for thir- 
teen full weeks in the winter, and that I should 
like to have it open for thirteen full weeks in 
the summer. I ought to explain to you, that I 
had made an agreement that I would not teach 
anywhere else, and that my salary was fixed to 
run from the first of January to the last of De- 
cember, so that I was to arrange the school as I 
thought it best for me and for the community. 



THE SCHOOL. 133 

I do not think that I was selfish in the matter. 
There were reasons why it would have been 
an advantage to me to have had the school 
open for forty weeks ; but, on the other hand, 
I was interested in Mr. Spinner's plans and 
Mr. Workman's plans ; gradually I became ac- 
quainted with the men and women who work in 
the mill, and if I were to do it over again, and 
establish such schools as I wanted in the vil- 
lages up and down this river, I would not ask 
for more than twenty-six weeks' work out of the 
fifty-two, for these boys and girls. 

" I did think, and I said so to these gentle- 
men, that as we have a good many people who 
had not had all the school training that they 
could use to advantage, that it would be a good 
thing to open the school-house here for an even- 
ing school during three or four of the winter 
months. I said that if they were willing to do 
that, I would be here from half-past six, when 
supper is always over, to half-past nine. I said 
that I would not undertake more pupils than I 
could manage, but that I thought, with the help 
that I could find, which need not cost a great 
deal, we could manage perhaps, as many as forty 
pupils in the evening. In point of fact, we had 
an average of about thirty-five, and that is the 
way in which my time is divided. 

" There is an evening school, which runs for 



134 H °W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

two months late in the autumn. There is a reg- 
ular winter school, which runs three months. 
There is an evening school, which runs for two 
months more in the end of winter and in the 
spring ; then what they call the summer school 
comes in in the end of May, and in June and 
July ; and for the rest there are the holi- 
days." 

" Tell Mr. Freeman about your Mutual Im- 
provement Society," said Mr. Spinner. 

" I wanted to tell him about that," Miss Jane 
Stevens said, "but I think I had a little rather 
that he should see it first, and I wonder if you 
cannot bring him around this evening. They 
do not meet here to-night. They are going to 
give a sort of exhibition at the other hall. Bring 
him to that, if he is willing to sit through, and 
let him see what we do with our native talent 
here. After the exhibition is over, I will tell 
him something of the detail of its manage- 
ment." 

Accordingly, at tea-time in the evening, it 
was announced that Mr. Spinner and I were 
going to the evening entertainment provided by 
the society, and Mrs. Spinner and two or three 
of the older children went with us. We walked 
up the village street, and saw that other people 
were doing the same, to the church, and here I 



THE SCHOOL. I 35 

found that the entertainment was to be given in 
the large vestry of the church, which occupied 
the whole floor of the building, and into which 
we descended by a few steps, — the floor of the 
vestry being perhaps three feet below the sur- 
face of the ground. The room was not very 
high, but not so low but what we could hear and 
see easily. It was prettily decorated by well- 
chosen prints, and a nice frieze of well-drawn 
pictures illustrating the parables ran all round 
it just below the wall. I observed, as soon as I 
went in, that some forty seats were reserved in 
front. For the rest, the hall perhaps seated a 
hundred people more, and these seats were all 
taken before eight o'clock. The announcement 
had been that the exercises would begin at five 
minutes after eight, and in a moment I saw the 
reason for this announcement. Those of the 
factory hands who chose to come, and who 
were not released till eight o'clock, had thronged 
across directly from their work at the mill, ap- 
parently choosing to postpone their supper until 
after the entertainment was over, and they oc- 
cupied the seats which had been reserved for 
them. So soon as they were all in, the exercises 
of the evening began. 

A young man, who I should not think was 
more than twenty-one years old, stepped for- 
ward and made a bow and said, " Ladies and 



I36 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

gentlemen, we have a programme of unusual in- 
terest to offer you this evening. You will see 
that preparations have been made for a scientific 
experiment," — and he turned and pointed to 
rather a large trough which he had by his side. 
" At the last meeting of the philosophical sec- 
tion, Mr. St. John was appointed to tell us 
why ice floats upon water, and he has pre- 
pared one or two experiments which will illus- 
trate this." 

At once a young man stepped up from the 
floor, and brought his block of ice with him in a 
basket, showed how high it floated, and then, 
with various tubs and pumps and other appa- 
ratus, proceeded to give some simple informa- 
tion as to the properties of air and water, and 
what would happen, and what would not hap- 
pen, etc., in such a way as to interest his audi- 
ence, and certainly teach some of them some- 
thing which they did not know before. His 
statement was very short, and Mr. Spinner told 
me that no person was permitted to occupy 
more than five minutes, no matter if he had to 
demonstrate the most elaborate truths known to 
science. He was cordially applauded when he 
had done, and withdrew, leaving his ice floating 
upon the water. The president again stepped 
forward, consulted his paper, and said, " Two of 
the young ladies will favor us with a duet." 



THE SCHOOL. 1 37 

Two nice girls came up on the platform, their 
music was already ready for them on the piano, 
and they played sufficiently well a duet from 
Mercadante. 

" Mr. John Graham will read an anecdote." 
Mr. John Graham proved to be an old Scotch- 
man, I should think sixty years old. He came 
up with a book in his hand, and said he was 
going to read a story, which should not have 
been called an anecdote, by Fontenelle. I do 
not know where he found it ; I had never heard 
it before, and I never heard it since, but it was 
one of Fontenelle's nice little stories, with a 
clever moral. It was read in a very pathetic 
way, and held the audience for Mr. John Gra- 
ham's five minutes. And so this " variety enter- 
tainment " went on, without the slightest pause 
or breakdown. Sometimes the contributions 
were made by little children of seven years 
old, sometimes by their fathers or their grand- 
fathers. They passed from grave to gay, or 
from gay to grave, with apparently no prevision 
nor arrangement of contrast or similarity, but by 
the mere accident which had placed them upon 
the programme. But what was important was, 
that they interested the audience, they were curi- 
ously suggestive, and they must have started con- 
versation and thought, as hardly any elaborate 
lecture could have done. 



138 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

I could not make Spinner understand how 
curious I thought the whole thing. He did not, 
indeed, look at it quite as I did. He looked at 
it rather as something of course, which had 
grown up quite naturally out of the exercises at 
the Sunday-school, and out of the school exhibi- 
tions. He gave Miss Jane Stevens the principal 
credit of it, and, after it was over, she walked 
home with us, and I tried to make her give me 
some idea of the way in which all these people had 
been brought to be their own teachers and their 
own entertainers upon a public stage. She said 
that she did not think anybody had planned 
these entertainments, but that they had grown 
up simply enough out of a little society of 
boys and girls, which had formed itself when 
these young people were all five years younger 
than they were now. They had had, as most 
villages had, the usual run of fourth-rate lectur- 
ers coming up and charging money for their 
entertainments, till they had got tired of such 
things. She was, in the meanwhile, trying to 
interest them in the reading-room and in the 
library, but she found that they wanted to get 
together ; they wanted to have a chance to talk 
and to walk home together, and she had pro- 
posed that there should be two or three little 
entertainments, conducted by themselves, at the 
end of every evening. But it proved that it was 



THE SCHOOL. 139 

much easier to arrange for a field meeting of the 
society once a fortnight than it was to be get- 
ting up little separate entertainments more fre- 
quently, and gradually the thing had assumed 
the shape which I saw. Of course, those who 
could sing had a certain commodity which they 
could always offer at these entertainments ; but 
it was her business, and the business of the 
other leaders of the society, to find out what 
contribution other people could bring in. The 
men of a more mechanical gift were rather 
pleased if something which they had read in 
the Scientific American, or in the other jour- 
nals, could be made of use to their fellow work- 
men. Occasionally, a stranger was at hand ; 
but, generally speaking, she had found that 
strangers did not understand their audience as 
well as they understood it themselves. A dec- 
lamation always interested these audiences, but 
it would not have interested them if it had been 
the declamation of a professional reader from 
the outside ; it interested them because they 
listened to then own sons or their own daugh- 
ters. "And in short," said Miss Jane Ste- 
vens, "in all our effort to provide amusement 
for our winter evenings, there is nothing on the 
whole which is so popular as this entertainment 
of the Mutual Improvement Society, and that you 
may guess, now that you see it in the autumn, 



140 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

and if I tell you it has been kept up throughout 
the year. For the rest," she said, "we make 
quite a point of keeping up the musical training 
of the village. When I say we, I mean I and 
Mrs. Spinner and Mrs. Workman and the doc- 
tor, and two or three other people, on whom the 
stress of the effort comes ; but with every year 
we have more and more helpers. Mr. Spinner 
will tell you that we have quite the beginning of 
a little band. You heard how well those two 
girls played, and how well that quartette of boys 
sang ; and really, last winter, our six or eight 
concerts were not only a pleasure to those who 
heard, but were really creditable to the perform- 
ers." I asked her whether I had now found out 
the secret of the high platform in her school- 
room, and she said I had. She said that when 
they did not think they should have a large 
audience, the children felt more at home in 
the schoolroom, and that she had many a time 
met small companies of them there, when they 
should never have thought of announcing an en- 
tertainment in the vestry of the church. " But 
here," said she, "we can act charades, we can 
speak dialogues, we can tell stories. Why, I 
have read them half the Arabian Nights here, 
when they were sewing or knitting, or the boys 
were drawing at the table yonder. Indeed, 
they are never more pleased than they are to 



THE SCHOOL. I4I 

have what they call an evening in the school- 
house ; but that is purely an informal thing, as 
they might meet for an evening party at Mr. 
Spinner's house, or at Mr. Workman's." 



CHAPTER VIII. 



HOURS OF WORK. 



MR. SPINNER explained to me their ex- 
periment about the hours of work in a 
long conversation of which I took full notes at 
the time. 

"You will easily see that matters of some dif- 
ficulty under any other system of management 
settle into matters of detail with us, and adjust 
themselves. 

"Workman and I had both been anxious and 
interested in eight-hour plans. But we knew 
enough to know that if one state in America 
passed an eight-hour law, and the next did not, 
the result would be simply the driving factories 
and workmen across the border, and that no- 
body would gain anything. So that, though I 
have agitated a good deal of that thing in gen- 
eral, I had never seen any good chance in detail. 
Our system here differs from anything I had 
heard of, and it came to us, as such things do, 
rather by accident than studied design. 

"I was in New York, — it was in April, — the 



HOURS OF WORK. 1 43 

end of April, — and I met a jobber there whom I 
had not seen before, a Boston man named Atkins. 
He took a fancy to some goods he had bought 
from an agent and made an appointment to see 
me. He told me that his people, — some tailors 
he dealt with, — liked the goods, and he wanted 
to know how large a lot I could send him steadily 
for six months. I figured on it a little, and told 
him. I saw he was disappointed, — a little an- 
noyed, I thought. It was the first intimation he 
had had that we were not one of the great slam- 
bang concerns, to whom a hundred million pieces 
are nothing at all. When I saw this, — I hated 
to disappoint a good customer, — I said, ' Either 
that, — or twice that' 

" He asked what I meant, and I said I would 
light up, and run two sets of hands. 

" Well, he did not care what I did. If I had 
set the mill afire, he would not have cared, so 
his tailors were suited. He accepted my first 
price, and I came home a good deal fright- 
ened, to tell Workman and the rest what I had 
done. I do not run this mill by caucus. No 
sir ! I do as I choose, and make the plans ; and 
other men do their parts, and the plans come 
out as well as they can. But this time I did 
call the heads of rooms into my counting-room, 
— what you would call ' foremen,' — and I said 
that we had a chance to double profit if we 



144 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

would double work, — and that I had done this 
thing. But I said that I hated night work. 
It was demoralizing ; it was bad for the men 
and women engaged ; and the work itself was 
bad when it was done. I said that if we had 
won any credit with these unknown tailors, it 
had been by doing work a little better than 
other people did, and that we should very soon 
lose that credit if we did not keep up to the stan- 
dard of the goods they had received from us. 
Then it was, that, on a hint from one of the 
men, we tried, rather as an experiment, the 
system on which we have run this mill ever 
since. There is a certain freemasonry about 
weavers and spinners. They know of other 
weavers and spinners, just as jewellers know of 
other jewellers, and printers of other printers. 
I gave out word that, beginning with a fort- 
night from the next Monday, we were going 
for the summer on the eight-hour principle. 
At the same time, I gave out word that the 
mill would open at four o'clock in the morn- 
ing, and that the people who came to work 
then would be dismissed at twelve for that day. 
There was not to be any cessation of the work, 
however. The power was to be kept on and 
the machinery kept running, and another set 
of hands would come in at twelve and work 
till eight in the evening. I do not believe the 



HOURS OF WORK. 145 

thing could have been done so easily in a large 
establishment as it was with us. But the men 
and women wrote all up and down the valley, 
to friends that were in other mills, who wanted 
to make an easy summer of it, and before my 
fortnight was over, I had people enough troop- 
ing in here, who wanted to be taken on this 
rather luxurious arrangement. You will see 
yourself that the trouble is in the inspection 
of the work more than it is in the doing of 
the work. Nobody likes to be responsible for 
work done in his room, of which he did not 
see every detail; but the heads of rooms man- 
aged that after a fashion. They worked much 
more than eight hours, and they had head men 
of their own, whom they liked, and in whom 
they had some confidence, whom they put in 
charge in their absence. Then, as you will 
easily see, under our principle, where each man 
has something of the interest of an owner, there 
is a great deal more mutual oversight than there 
would be in a room where everything was cut- 
throat and every spinner was trying to do as 
little as he could, so he could only be paid for 
doing more. Then you would find that a girl 
who tended a frame, made, by methods known 
to herself, some private arrangement, so that 
another girl whom she knew, — perhaps her 
sister or some friend of hers, somebody who 



I46 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

lived in the same house with her, — should 
tend that same frame in the afternoon. There 
is not much sentiment about a spinning-frame, 
but there is some, and a girl would not like to 
come in in the morning and find things amiss, 
when an entire stranger had been running her 
machine, while she would be good-natured 
enough about it, if the person who had run it 
was her own protegee, or in some way was her 
friend. 

"So it was that for that summer we ran this 
mill sixteen hours where we had run it ten 
hours before. It did not quite double the time, 
but, in truth, although it did not quite double 
the work, it came nearer it than I expected. 
We had not the difficulty which everybody 
told me we should have, of the machinery get- 
ting out of ^order, because nobody was responsi- 
ble for it. It ended in our holding a person 
responsible for a piece of cloth who began 
that piece. This was not strictly fair, but it 
was so evident that there must be some rule 
about it, that everybody accepted that rule. In 
point of fact, the cloth stood inspection remark- 
ably well, and, after a little fuss at the begin- 
ning, I never found that anybody pretended 
that he could tell the difference between work 
which was done in the afternoon and work which 
was done in the morning, or vice versa. 



HOURS OF WORK. 1 47 

" I suppose there was a difference, but it was 
one of those minute kinds of differences which 
you lawyers say the law does not care about. 
The upshot of it all was that I held my contract 
with this Boston man, who has been one of our 
best customers ever since. 

" But when it came to the first of November, 
we stopped this double business. In the first 
place, our contract was up, and in the second 
place, I and Workman and all the best heads of 
rooms were resolute that we would not have any 
night work. Of course, by the first of Novem- 
ber, we were burning a good deal of oil, morning 
and night, — that was before we got in our elec- 
tric plant, — and the oil was an expense. It hap- 
pened that year that I had just as lief run light 
as not. I was satisfied that the country was 
making more goods than it could sell, and I did 
not want to be found with an overstock in the 
spring. The men and women both had got used 
to the eight hours' work, and I told them all that 
I proposed to try as an experiment to run this 
mill, for the next four months, at only eight 
hours' time. This meant, you see, beginning 
after it was broad daylight, and ending at sun- 
down, or sometimes before. We made the sav- 
ing in oil, which is something ; we made some 
saving, I suppose, though not much, in fuel ; and 
the people made a great deal of saving in tern- 



I48 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

per. I lost some workmen, — there is no doubt 
of that. They went off where they could get 
more money ; for practically, all our people are 
paid by the piece, and of course a man cannot 
make so many pieces of woollen cloth in forty- 
eight hours as he can in sixty. It is all non- 
sense to pretend that he can. But he makes 
more than forty-eight sixtieths ; he makes more 
than eight-tenths of it. When his mind is set 
to it, and he is determined to drive things, and 
he has time to keep his machinery in good order, 
and does not mind staying a little before and 
after work to see to that, his eight hours are 
worth more to him than when he is in a hurry 
to leave his work as soon as it is done, and is 
only eager to come in late in the morning. You 
will say that this is an advantage which wears 
off after people have been used to the eight- 
hours system. All I can say is, it does not wear 
off with us. On the other hand, we find that 
these people regard their machinery a good deal 
as you regard a horse which has got to do so 
much work for you. You would like to have 
the horse in as good order as he can be in, and 
even if you have to take care of him yourself, 
you would rather do that than have him fail 
you when you are in the saddle or going over 
the hills. 

" What we have settled down on, then, is eight 



HOURS OF WORK. 1 49 

hours' time from the first of November to the 
first of March every year, and during that period 
we give a full hour for dinner. I do not say 
that the people would like it all the year round. 
I think that in the summer men would have a 
feeling that they were wasting time, and that 
they would leave us, and go off to places where 
they could get more money in the day or more 
money in the week. But the human mind is so 
formed that people do like variety. It is just as 
a woman wants to move her bedstead once in 
six months, and is sure she makes more room 
every time she moves it. These people are 
glad when the first of November comes and the 
hours of work are radically changed ; and they 
are just as glad when the first of March comes, 
and they are changed again. It gives us, as you 
will see, a good chance for our evening school, 
of which we make a good deal ; and it gives a 
good chance for our evening entertainments, 
which are very good for keeping up the moral 
life of the people. It throws men more into the 
library and reading-room than it would if they 
were tired, and, in short, I think it a very good 
arrangement for the summer, and I am disposed 
to think that the men agree with me. 

" I wonder if you remember a droll paper there 
is of Franklin's, about his discovering that it 
was light in Paris three or four hours before 



I50 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

people got out of bed. I remember a man I 
knew, who went to Spain on business, told me 
how much surprised, not to say amused, he was 
when he saw, in the city of Madrid, the masons 
were at work before five o'clock in the morning, 
on a house opposite his hotel ; and he saw the 
other side of it when he saw that the same 
masons did not touch a brick between half-past 
eleven in the middle of the day and half-past 
three. Well, if you turn out with fifty or sixty 
people, as I have done again and again now for 
years, at four o'clock in the morning, just when 
a few streaks are beginning to light up the 
eastern sky, it may be, and go into the mill with 
those people, and all get to work just as it is 
beginning to be light enough to go to work, you 
have a little that same feeling that my friend 
had in Spain ; you have a little of the feeling 
that Franklin describes in this paper. You are 
a little surprised to know that you are at work 
when half the world is asleep, and you do not 
dislike the surprise. Least of all do you dislike 
it when, at twelve o'clock, somebody else comes 
in and takes your work. You have the liberty 
of a marquis, or a duke, or anybody else. You 
go to sleep if you want to ; you can read ; you 
can go a-fishing. I daresay you have met some 
of my men with their baskets and flies upon the 
streams that you have been tracking. It does 



HOURS OF WORK. 151 

the man no harm, you may be sure of that ; and 
he comes home, with his feet wet, if you please, 
and pretty tired, quite ready to go to bed at sun- 
down, or before sundown, that he may be at his 
work at four in the morning. 

" There is no doubt that with the men and the 
women too, the early rising watch, for that is 
what we call them, is the more agreeable of the 
two ; so we change and change about when 
Sunday comes. Watch A, as it is called on our 
books, has the morning work for one week, and 
it takes the afternoon work in the next week. 
Then, when the third week comes, Watch A has 
the morning again, and in the fourth week it 
has the afternoon again, and we did not change 
this order of watches from the beginning of the 
season till the end. But as to the men and 
women in the watches, they have a good deal of 
liberty. They have what they call their part- 
ners ; by which I mean that two people, as I 
have said, are in some sort responsible for the 
same frame or the same loom, and if one of 
those partners wants a half day off, and makes a 
bargain with his partner to run for him, we wink 
at it, if you choose to call it wink at it ; we 
know perfectly well that it is done, and once in 
a long while we permit that substitution. I 
should not, if I were the head of a room, permit 
it two days running. Sixteen hours' work is 



152 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

quite too much to be done two days, unless 
there is to be a holiday the next day. But, as 
you know, the work at a frame or at a loom is 
not so much physical fatigue as it is a certain 
kind of nervous work ; and once in a dog's age 
such a thing as this may be permitted, though 
it should never be encouraged. Now all this, as 
you will see, links in with, and has direct refer- 
ence to the system of schooling which we have 
adopted here, which is, after all, largely bor- 
rowed from the English experience, and about 
which you had better talk with the young wo- 
men who keep the schools. 

" It is easy to see how the footings come out 
from these rather varied hours. 104 days of 
winter, at 8 hours each, give 832 hours' work. 

"For the eight months of spring, summer, 
and autumn, the mills do twice as much a 
day, and the result, of course, of the eight 
months, is four times that of /the winter, or 832 
x 4, equals 3328. 

"This makes 4160 hours' work in a year, 
against 3100 hours which we should have gained 
from 310 days' work on a ten-hour system. 

"The law of this state restricts us to ten 
hours, and if it did not, the fact that other 
states are restricted to ten hours would have 
amounted to the same thing. In the long run, 
you cannot keep good workmen in an eleven- 



HOURS OF WORK. 1 53 

hour mill, when, by going over the border, they 
have a chance to work in a ten-hour mill. It is 
that which practically settles these questions, 
though there can be, of course, under our con- 
stitution, no national legislation on the subject. 
" It ought to be understood, indeed, that no 
state constitution gives any right to the legisla- 
ture to fix the hours of labor for any man. The 
arrangements for ten-hour systems, or other 
such systems, are made practically by legislation 
for the benefit of children, with regard to whom 
it is supposed that the legislature is omnipotent. 
When an eight-hour law is passed, as it has 
been passed, by Congress, it is simply a law pro- 
viding that men who work for the government 
shall work only for eight hours in every twenty- 
four. But the Bill of Rights in most states 
would be enough to show that a legislature must 
not interfere with the right of a man to sell in 
market his own labor, and as much of it as he 
chooses. I say this merely by the way. It is 
not of any great practical effect, because, prac- 
tically, most mills want to employ persons who 
are under age, and if those persons may, or in- 
deed must, go away at the end of ten hours, the 
work of the mill is so far deranged that it can- 
not be continued for eleven hours. This is the 
whole of our ten-hour statutes, and indeed the 
same is true with regard to those in England. 



154 H0W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

" But, as I have said, our arrangements here 
were wholly independent of statute. They grew 
up in the incidental way which I have described, 
but which, for us who want to make the most 
out of this plant here, — that is, out of these 
buildings and this machinery, — is, as you can 
see, very great. We gain thirty-three per cent in 
product out of the same amount of machinery. 
Our work-people are satisfied, and if they are 
satisfied, everybody is satisfied. We pay by the 
piece, as all mills do, so that we pay no more 
for three thousand hours' work on our time cal- 
endar than if we were carrying the same three 
thousand hours over more months in the year. 

" Practically, then, we are able to deliver more 
goods in a year than we were able to, or than 
we should be, if we worked on a ten-hour sys- 
tem. We are also using our machinery, not to 
the full top of its work, but for one-third more 
than we should be otherwise, and this gives us 
so far forth a better chance to be even with the 
time. It is a great thing for any manufacturer 
to work with the newest machinery which the 
progress of invention affords, and, other things 
being equal, there is therefore a certain advan- 
tage in wearing out a frame or a loom in three 
years which otherwise would have run four." 



CHAPTER IX. 



THE CHURCH. 



SUNDAY came around while I was at 
Hampton, and I went to church with Mr. 
Spinner, his wife and family. He told me at 
breakfast that we should hear the Baptist min- 
ister from Wentworth, who was coming up to 
take the morning service himself. Mr. Spinner 
spoke with pleasure of this arrangement, for he 
said I should be pleased with the sermon and 
the service, and he hoped that this gentleman 
would come first and dine with us. " He has 
not been here," said Mr. Spinner, "for a year or 
two, and I should be glad to show him some of 
our improvements. He is a man who is much 
liked in the whole county, and it is rather a 
matter of distinction that we should have him at 
our little church here." 

He then told me of the basis on which the 
church had arranged itself, and seemed to be, 
on the whole, well pleased that they had been 
able to do as much as they had done, although 
they had met with the difficulties inevitable 
where there are people coming and going all the 



I56 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

time, where many of the men and women are, if 
not irreligious, quite indifferent to religious ar- 
rangements, and where the whole community is 
so small that unless it unite together in some 
way it is difficult to maintain any regular 
church institution. 

" When we came here," he said, " there was 
no place of worship here at all. There is a Sec- 
ond-Advent meeting-house three or four miles 
down the road, and I think you may have no- 
ticed, as you went up, a meeting-house which is 
almost never used, which was built by some 
Seventh-Day Baptist people several years ago, 
when they had a revival in this neighborhood. 
But they all moved away, and I hardly know 
whether their house is kept in repair or not. At 
all events, it was too far away from us for us to 
make any use of it. In truth, one of the reasons 
of the failure of the enterprise that was here 
before us was that our village was not large 
enough to maintain a church. The more decent 
workmen would not come to a place where there 
was no church, and they had but a wretched set 
of hands here at the very best. The quality of 
their work-people alone was enough to break 
down their mills, if they had not broken down 
from bad management, as in fact they did. Af- 
ter we were established here, the better men, 
themselves, felt the need of doing something for 



THE CHURCH. I 57 

Sunday-school or a place of worship, in many 
instances where they had never cared for such 
things before. Nothing puts a man so much on 
his mettle as being bodily transplanted, and find- 
ing that there is no regular occupation for Sun- 
day, even if he have not been a regular church 
member himself, and affects to be indifferent to 
such things. The Catholic priest at Wentworth 
was quite willing to come up and hear confessions 
and carry on a service once in a month, and he 
did so in the school building, which the district 
committee were willing to let him have for this 
purpose. Different men put themselves into 
communication with one and another of the 
ministers at Wentworth, to know whether some 
service could not be maintained, perhaps on 
Sunday evening, or perhaps in the afternoon, 
by one and another person coming up the 
valley from there. To these proposals we 
had all sorts of answers, as we always would 
in such a case, but it seemed to me that 
there was enough of a necessity made out for 
me to address a pretty formal letter to Mr. 
Nourse on the subject, and that letter I 
accordingly wrote. 

" I told him that it was essential to a good 
manufacturing establishment to have the best 
workmen and not the worst. I told him that 
we should never have the more decent and self- 



158 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

respecting workmen, if there were these difficul- 
ties about worship. I told him that it seemed 
to me therefore that the men who owned this 
mill, and he was the most important of those 
men, should add to the rest of their plant here 
a church or meeting-house. That would show 
the men that they employed that they had an 
interest in this matter. For the rest, the men 
they employed must bear out the American 
principle, and must arrange for worship as best 
they could ; but that I thought that, without 
analyzing the matter too finely, or putting too 
fine a point upon things, it was the business 
of capital to provide a place where this part of 
the work of a manufacturing town should be 
carried on. 

" I got a very curious answer from Nourse. 
I should like to show it to you. He reminded 
me of the principle which had been laid down 
in the beginning ; namely, that capital was to 
have merely what we would call 'the idiot's 
dividend,' and that in a certain sense it was 
entitled to that, while in a certain sense it was 
not entitled to anything more. 'Now,' said he, 
'we have waived all questions of sentiment or 
mutual affection or of the interest of mankind, 
which you choose now to bring up when you 
discuss the matter of a church edifice. I do 
not mean to say that if, half an hour hence, 



THE CHURCH. I 59 

a man comes into my room, and takes off his 
hat, and asks me to subscribe for building a 
church in Honolulu or in Texas, I may not 
do it ; but I do not think that that man must 
come to me from Hampton. In Hampton I am 
engaged in a business enterprise. I have been 
told that this business enterprise could pay me 
what we call the idiot's dividend. I feel safe, 
therefore, about refusing to mix up a business 
enterprise like this with my philanthropy. If 
you, and the men who are at work with you, 
really think that a church is as much a part 
of the capital stock of this concern as is the 
dyeing vat, you ought to prove this by your 
works. I own some dyeing vats in your mills, 
or I own ninety-five hundredths of them, and 
on my property in those vats I am paid four per 
cent interest. I will put up for you in Hamp- 
ton a meeting-house on exactly those terms. 
It shall be costly or inexpensive, as you please. 
It shall be a handsome church, built of your 
own stone there, by the best architect in New 
York, or it shall be built of rough-hewn planks, 
slabs, and shingles, just as you please. It shall 
cost fifty thousand dollars, or it shall cost five 
hundred, just as you please ; but the congrega- 
tion that worship in it on Sunday, and the 
people who use it for other services on week 
days, shall pay me the idiot's dividend, or shall 



l60 HOW .THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

pay the proprietors a dividend, exactly as they 
pay them on the dyeing vats.' 

" He said we might keep this offer open for 
two months, and he would be bound by it at the 
end of the time. 

" I read this aloud at a meeting which we 
held in the store to consider it. All the men 
were pleased with it, or almost all of them were. 
They said it meant business, and they were 
rather flattered by the half confidence that it 
placed in them. They appointed a committee 
to go to Wentworth and Tenterdon. Eventually, 
the committee went as far as New Haven to 
see some plans, and it all ended in our build- 
ing this place which we are going to to-day. 
We got a plan from the Methodists ; they pub- 
lish some very good plans and some very cheap 
plans, and we never had to pay an architect 
a cent, because they furnished us, very good- 
naturedly, the plan which we have adopted. 
The building was made from our lumber here, 
and it cost a little inside of three thousand 
dollars. It stands on our books as having cost 
twenty-nine hundred dollars. In this case we 
pay the idiot's dividend, exactly as we pay it 
on the other capital stock of the concern. In 
fact, it is an enlargement of the capital stock 
by twenty-nine hundred dollars, and Mr. Nourse 
owns the whole of this, whereas he only owns 



THE CHURCH. l6l 

ninety-five per cent of the rest of the stock. 
You see, then, that whoever occupies this 
church has to pay one hundred and sixteen 
dollars a year for rent to him. They also have 
to pay something — not much — for its insur- 
ance. One hundred and sixteen dollars a year 
is rather more than two dollars a week; and 
the committee who had it in charge deter- 
mined very soon that the rent of the church 
and of the vestry, for any and every pur- 
pose for which it was used, should be one 
dollar a day. They thought, and it has proved 
that they thought rightly, that they should be 
almost certain of renting the church fifty-two 
times in the year for Sunday services. Thus 
they would have fifty-two dollars. Then they 
thought, and as it proved they thought rightly, 
that there would be so many occasions when 
the vestry was wanted for a public hall, as you 
saw it was wanted the other night when they 
had the entertainment there, that they should 
get from that sixty or seventy dollars more. In 
point of fact, they have always had enough to 
keep the building in repair, keep it warm, and 
to pay for their lights in the evening. The 
occupation evenings costs a little more than the 
occupation on Sunday, because the lights have 
to be provided for ; but we have water power 
running to waste here, so that since we got in 



1 62 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

our electric plant, the light really costs them 
very little, and indeed, blessings to kerosene, 
it never cost them a great deal." 

Accordingly, when Sunday afternoon came, 
the family mustered in great force for the ser- 
vice. Mr. Sherlock arrived late — but came. 
I had gone with the children and my host him- 
self to a Sunday-school in the morning, which 
was largely attended by grown people as well as 
children, and required the use of many parts of 
the church itself, as well as of the large and 
small rooms in the vestry. Spinner explained 
to me as we went, that for a service with a ser- 
mon all the committees found it more conven- 
ient, as they had no settled minister, to take 
the afternoon, or, as on this occasion, the after- 
noon and the evening. For, with this arrange- 
ment, they could often secure the presence and 
service of clergymen whom they liked to hear, 
from the large towns in the neighborhood, who 
could not arrange to be absent from their own 
pulpits in the morning. This Mr. Sherlock, who 
was to preach, was a general favorite. He would 
not have come to them at all, however, had he 
been needed in the morning, for he was then 
engaged in the service of his own church. 

Spinner's son George, and his daughter Pru- 
dence had both been trained, as it proved, to 
write in shorthand, and they told me that they 



THE CHURCH. 1 63 

had notes of most of the sermons which had 
been preached in the church now for two or 
three years. When I found that Mr. Sherlock 
spoke without a manuscript, I was glad that the 
young people were preserving his sermon. For 
thus I was able to bring away what is a good 
report of it, which I made them write out for 
me. I copy it here, because he had caught, very 
thoroughly, the notion which was at the bottom 
of the various plans at Hampton, and the ser- 
mon states some principles of that notion, as 
I may not succeed in stating them elsewhere. 

The text was : " Bear ye one another's bur- 
dens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." 

I think you must have noticed, when I read 
the New Testament lesson, that in the same ap- 
peal Paul bids every man bear his own burden. 
It is almost in one breath that he says that 
every man must bear his own burden and that 
every man must bear his brother's burden. 
Now it will not do for a moment to suppose 
that this is a matter of thoughtless rhetoric, — 
or that these two injunctions may be separated 
out from each other, and taken each for itself 
alone. You will not find any thoughtless rhet- 
oric in this man's injunctions, — no, not when 
he is in the highest heaven. This man Paul is 
a master of life. He understood the great sci- 



164 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ence of living through and through. Because 
he understands it, — because he knows what he 
is talking about, — though he has only a few 
years for his work, — though he goes from place 
to place, now as a prisoner, now as a travelling 
tent-maker, — he changes all Europe from what 
it was to what it is. He makes the Western 
World over, because he has the practical power 
to inspire it with the Divine Life. Such a man 
does not talk by accident, or for immediate ef- 
fect. He has a principle beneath every word he 
uses. And you and I must not take one of his 
practical injunctions without allying it with the 
others, and studying them together. 

You will find, then, all through, that this great 
leader of men speaks as a workman speaks to 
other workmen. He tells us always, — what in 
one central text he says in one epigram, — 
that we are fellow-workmen together with God. 
As the Saviour had said, "My Father worketh 
hitherto, and I work," Paul takes it for granted 
that all who make any claim to take the Saviour's 
name mean to work in the world into which they 
were born. They are not to dream out their 
salvation, — nor to talk their salvation into each 
other, — nor to argue it out, — nor to buy it with 
a great price, — they are to work it out. He 
speaks as a workman to workmen. And he 
takes care all along that they shall know that 



THE CHURCH. 165 

he is a workman, and that he is not ashamed of 
his work. " Mine own hands ministered to my 
necessities," he says, and never fails to remind 
them that, by example of daily industry, he has 
illustrated what he means, when he says so 
quaintly, and even sharply, that every man must 
mind his own business. 

Speaking in this way, as a man who knows 
what work is, who has been bred to a good 
trade at which he can earn a living, Paul, the 
most practical of leaders of men, is engaged in 
this chapter in telling these people the wonders 
of the great word "Together." How this little 
handful of men is to rule and govern the world, 
because no man is alone, but We act, — made 
perfect in union, or, as the Saviour said, made 
perfect in one. Of this instruction, the text is 
the central statement, as you saw when I read 
the passage. But he is wholly determined that 
each man shall know his personal responsibility. 
No man is to undertake that vague, smoky, gen- 
eral, noisy philanthropy, which disgraces the word 
philanthropy, — in which a religious tramp an- 
nounces that he will save the world, when he 
cannot say what is his own special place and 
part in the world's salvation. Paul will not let 
any man think he can sing well enough to sing 
in the chorus, unless he can sing well enough 
when it is his place to sing a solo. And no man 



1 66 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

is to come to him and say, " Paul, I should like a 
commission to go out to the world and reform 
the world, and quicken it with a new life," unless 
that man can show Paul that he has a work of 
his own that he can do, — has a place of his own 
that he fills well, — or, as he puts it in better 
words, unless this man shows that he can bear 
his own burden. 

No sceptic or scoffer made any point by turn- 
ing on Paul after one of his addresses, to say, 
"Who are you to be lecturing us about industry, 
or sobriety, or patience in work ? You are hear- 
ing your own voice, and you like to hear it. Try 
hard work, and see how you like that." No man 
said that to Paul, for they knew what the answer 
would be. " Who am I ? I am a tent-maker. 
Come down to Narrow Street, and see if there 
is better tent-cloth in Corinth than I have there, 
— or if there is a better shelter-tent than I made 
yesterday." He knew how to bear his own bur- 
den, and so he knew how to bear the burdens of 
the world. 



I will take another occasion, if your com- 
mittee are so good as to ask me to Hampton 
again, to show by separate passages from Paul's 
letters how distinct is the instruction he gives 
to any young workingman who wants to suc- 
ceed, and means to succeed, as to the method 



THE CHURCH. 167 

of his daily life. He does not simply say that 
every man shall bear his own burden, but, in 
one practical instruction and another, he shows 
him how. But not to-day. Our business to-day 
is with the other text. How a man shall do his 
part as a member of the common family — what 
people now call the community. How shall a 
man show his public spirit — do his share in the 
public or common life ? How and where shall a 
Christian man appear as a good citizen of the 
state or as a good member of the church ? 

First, and very briefly, because this is to be 
the whole subject of that other sermon, — let 
him know how to do his own work well. Let 
him be no pretender. How shall he offer him- 
self for the world's service, if his own house is 
not in order? I am greatly interested in the 
men and women who help Paul. There is a 
man of whom we know nothing but that he was 
once Paul's amanuensis, and that Paul was fond 
of him. " I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle," 
he says, with a certain pride. There was a man 
who knew how to write. He knew how to spell 
well. Paul was troubled with his weak eyes, 
they say, and was glad when Tertius volun- 
teered. But he would not have been glad had 
Tertius been a pretender, — if he wrote a care- 
less hand, or if his Greek grammar was bad, or 
if he spelled badly. In truth, Tertius knew how 



1 68 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

to write as well as Paul knew how to make 
tents. He wrote well, — well enough to make 
the first draft of the letter to the Romans. 
And his name is presented to every man who 
has his Bible, — as the name of a faithful fellow, 
who has served mankind, — for century after 
century, through all time, because he knew 
how to do one thing well, and because he was 
willing to consecrate that talent to the common 
weal. 

Now keep that example in mind all along. 
Then you can carry into the notion of common 
work, — the work of the Common Weal ; or, as 
Paul would say, of the Kingdom of God, — this 
first necessity that it is clean work, work well 
done. It is not slop-work. It is good journey- 
work, as our fathers used to say. Take for a 
second thought the eternal truth which Paul 
falls back to so eagerly, — that, if one member 
be alive and strong, the whole body will have 
a better chance to be alive and strong. Once 
and again he falls back upon that fable which 
the Roman senator addressed to the Roman 
people, — the body cannot be well unless each 
hand and eye and foot is well. Life in the 
parts, — quick, tingling life, — so that there 
may be life in the whole, — vigorous, strong, 
eternal. 

How many men I have known, — how many 



THE CHURCH. 169 

men you have known, — who had even gained 
for themselves a sort of public reputation for 
this care of the business of the community, who 
have so utterly neglected Paul's personal direc- 
tions that they cannot take any care of their 
own. Such a man, by some political turn, is 
appointed a consul abroad, or a secretary of 
legation. He studies international affairs, he 
devotes himself to the public business in these 
lines. By and by, there is a political overturn 
at home, and the government will not renew 
his commission. He has to come home. He 
is apt to complain that he is left out in the 
cold. Then you begin to ask what he is fit for ; 
" What did he do when he was at home ? " 
That was the question which the Connecticut 
farmer asked the French marshal, Rochambeau. 
And you find that at home he did nothing but 
manage primary meetings and attend county 
conventions, and, in other fashions, take care of 
elections. He had no trade or calling in which 
he was a master. I suppose this to be what 
Paul would have called failing to bear his own 
burden. What follows ? Why, when the coun- 
try, wisely or unwisely, turns him out from its 
service, there is, alas ! no place left where he is 
to fall. 

But I do not mean to speak slightly of what 
this man has done in attending primary meet- 



1 70 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ings, in going to county conventions, and in 
preparing for elections. I hope no man hears 
me who does not go to primary meetings and 
who is not willing to take his share of duty in 
county conventions, and who does not diligently 
and with prayer prepare for every election of 
the town or of the state. I do say, that no man 
can rightly attend, even to such little public 
duties as that, and that no man can have the 
power in such service that a man should seek, 
who has not shown that he can wisely and well 
mind his own business, keep his own accounts, 
pay his own debts, stay out of debt, and earn 
an honorable reputation as a manly -workman. 

Such a man as that has flung away his life in 
trying to care for the state, while he cannot 
show that there is one part of its separate duties 
that he can do well. He cannot bear his own 
burdens, because he has all his life thought he 
was bearing other people's. Alas ! the other 
people do not agree with him ! They think he 
never bore theirs. And this I say only by 
illustration. I have to speak of what affects us 
here more directly. I have to speak of the 
welfare of the Church of Christ, as an organ- 
ized institution. And I am not speaking of this 
particular church of yours, or, may I say, yours 
and ours ? For I do not know you personally 
as well as I wish I did, and so I have no knowl- 



THE CHURCH. \*J\ 

edge from which I can speak personally of your 
affairs. But, in many churches, — and a pity 
it is to have to say so, — there are brethren, 
yes, and there are sisters, who are prominent in 
the business of the Church as a church, who 
cannot take care of their own business. It 
seems as if they took the time for the affairs of 
the organization which they would have better 
spent on their own affairs. Or, looking the other 
way, it seems as if, because they found nothing 
to do in their own business, they thought they 
would undertake the Master's business rather 
than do nothing. Now he wants no such re- 
cruits. He wants whole men and whole women. 
He wants those who can do a good day's work, 
and do it well. He wants those who have been 
faithful in few things, — and it is those, and 
those only whom he promotes to the charge 
of many things. It is the faithful, industrious, 
yes, and successful saint, who has used the 
talent which was given him, who has rightly 
and well handled the pound intrusted to him, 
to whom there comes, to surprise his modesty, 
that noblest welcome ever spoken, " Enter thou 
into the joy of thy Lord." And no man can 
pretend to tell what is the injury which has 
been inflicted on the Church by the profane 
interference in the work it has to do, of those 
whom men saw incapable of doing their own 



172 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

work. Their words are vain ; their appeals are 
vain ; their counsels are vain ; — because men 
judge them by their fruits. They have not 
borne their own burdens well, and so it is that, 
in this most important affair of all, it is certain 
that they cannot bear their brothers'. 

Now, by the side of that failure, — of the man 
whom I described just now, the man who put 
his trust in princes, and found princes failed him, 
— I will tell you the story of another failure. 
It is the man who stitches and hammers at 
shoes on his bench, — ten, twelve hours a day, 
perhaps, — or who stands behind his counter 
from early morning to late evening, or who 
drudges in the same self-imposed slavery at the 
forge or the grindstone, and does nothing else, 
does nothing larger. He does not bear his 
brother's burdens. He does not care for the com- 
mon weal. He will let his children go to the pub- 
lic school. But he will not serve on the district 
committee. He will let his wife take a book 
from the public library. But he will not be a 
trustee or a director. He is willing to walk on 
the sidewalk and drive on the road. But he will 
not be a county commissioner, or a selectman, 
or a roadmaster. He is willing to have the gov- 
ernment bring him his letters and his newspa- 
pers, and to pay for that service not half what -it 
costs. But he is not willing to go to an election, 



THE CHURCH. 1 73 

or to compel the right choice so far as his power 
goes. "He does not care for politics." ^Esop 
would have been glad to put such a man in a 
fable. But even ^Esop could not find a fox or a 
hedgehog who was so mean. This is the man who 
tells you, "I care for nobody, — no, not I !" — 
and he deserves to have the other half of the song 
come true, which says that "nobody cares for me." 

Mr. Sherlock made a long pause after this 
description of selfishness, and then, addressing 
himself personally to the men in front of him, 
he said : — 

I say all this here, because I think you work- 
men at Hampton have even more distinct du- 
ties in these lines than the general run of work- 
men in America. I declare to you, that I think 
this system of manufacture which you have 
started here, is going to stand or fall, to succeed 
or to fail, — according to the answers which the 
men in this church now, — the hundred and fifty 
of you who are workers and voters and thinkers, 
— make to these two demands of Paul. You 
have started a system in which the workman is 
the capitalist in part, and in which the workman 
shares as he ought to share in the ups and 
downs of every honorable adventure. There is 
no act of Congress or of Parliament that any 



174 H W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

man should grow rich. There is a promise of 
the Eternal God that the community which lives 
by His law, and seeks Him, shall find Him. 
More than this, — He has said that the commu- 
nity which seeks Him and finds His Kingdom, 
shall have these little things, such as meat and 
drink and clothing ; they shall be added, He has 
said, to His other infinite compensations. But 
this community must live by His law. It must 
obey Him. It must be part of His Kingdom. 
He must be King. No man in it shall live for 
himself. They must live for the common good. 
Every man in it must bear his own burden. 
But every man also must bear his brother's. I 
say, that on your success here will it depend 
whether other mill-owners will try the same ven- 
ture, whether other workmen will have the same 
opportunity. I say you will succeed if the very 
men who hear me are willing to count them- 
selves, not as lonely men, but as brothers in the 
great brotherhood, — as fellow-soldiers in Christ's 
army. I do not know if you thought of this 
when you began. I think perhaps you builded 
better than you knew. But this I know, — and 
you will learn, — that your enterprise will suc- 
ceed as fast and as far as every workman in it 
works as a fellow-workman with God, and so is 
willing and ready to do his share of the building 
of God's Kingdom in the world. 



CHAPTER X. 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. 



I HAD seen in the co-operative store that 
they had made all the arrangements for a 
reading-room, and that they had a very small 
collection of books of reference which they used 
there. They said that they had had a more 
extensive collection of books, but that when the 
library was founded their books went in with 
the others into that collection. This led me to 
inquire about the library the next morning from 
my friend, and he sent one of his children with 
me that afternoon to see it, and to talk with 
the librarian. The library was in a separate 
house, which they told me had been a dye-house 
in the old mill ; but which had been taken pos- 
session of for this purpose, when the new 
dye-house was built under the direction of the 
present company. I found that the pecuniary 
arrangement of the library was precisely the 
same as that made for the church. This old 
dye-house had been valued. The house was 
worth, at the time they took possession of it, 



iy6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

$475, an d they paid a rent of four per cent to the 
proprietors of the mill for the use of it. Indeed, 
I found on talking to one or two of the men and 
several of the women, that they all understood 
that it was better on every account that they 
should maintain the library, themselves, and that 
it should not be counted as an eleemosynary in- 
stitution or an institution which other people 
founded for them. I had no doubt, from my ex- 
perience with some other institutions elsewhere, 
that it was much more than worth the trifle which 
they paid for rent, to be able to diffuse the feel- 
ing among all the young people, and what I may 
call the outsiders, that they bought these books 
themselves for themselves, and that nobody was 
trying to stuff down their throats a particular 
literature selected by some higher power. In- 
deed, the first step in the institution of the 
library, large or small, is apt to be a false one, 
and its falseness is in this direction — of con- 
descension. The founder of the library has 
given ten thousand dollars, and he thinks, and 
probably thinks correctly, that he knows better 
than the people who are to read it what they 
had better read. He is right in thinking that 
he knows better than they do. But he is wrong 
in thinking that he can make them read books 
which they do not want to read. 

Now, exactly as in the co-operative store, the 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. 1 77 

store began to succeed when they gave the pur- 
chasers an equal share in the profit, so in the 
library, the library begins to succeed when the 
readers begin to understand that it is, in good 
faith, their library, and not the library that some- 
body else has made for them. You may use any 
amount of moral suasion you choose in persuad- 
ing them to read good books instead of bad 
books. In the long run they will find that a 
good book is better than a bad one, as indeed 
its name would seem to imply. But you are 
not going to make them read books because 
certain other people of an education different 
from their own had read them and say they 
ought to be read. 

The most striking instance I ever knew of the 
infelicity of letting one set of people buy books 
for another, is in the story told of a state gov- 
ernment, in old times, which used to send to 
the same publisher annually, for so many thou- 
sand dollars' worth of books for the state library. 
Poor human nature is so weak that they say he 
could not resist the temptation of clearing off, 
every year, so much of his stock which the rest 
of the purchasing world had not chosen to buy. 
Now those books which he sent were undoubt- 
edly good books, well printed, and well bound. 
But, after all, the use of a book is to be read. 
Indeed, the sooner it is read to pieces, the bet- 



1^8 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

ter. For you can certainly get another copy, 
and you know then that it has fulfilled its mis- 
sion. The danger and the vice of librarians is, 
that they are apt to think that it is important 
that their books should be kept on the shelves. 
Now, on the other hand, they should regard 
themselves as doing a duty exactly like that of 
the directors or cashiers of banks, whose busi- 
ness it is to keep the money of the stockholders 
in active circulation, to know where it is, and to 
be able to recall it at the proper times, and by 
no means to lock up all their capital stock in 
their vaults, of no use to any one. 

The public library at Hampton was not 
above receiving gifts, however, after it was 
organized. In point of fact, Mr. Nourse made 
it some very handsome gifts. As Mr. Spinner 
had told me, he was a great traveller, and he had 
formed a habit, when he was in any distant city, 
of sending to them such books as would illus- 
trate the history or customs of the country in 
which he was, if he could find them in English. 
And he passed his rule sometimes when he could 
send good illustrated books, though they were in 
other languages. Still, as Miss Jane Stevens 
had said of her little library, — the principal sup- 
port of the library was from the people them- 
selves. The committee which directed it was a 
sub-committee of the government of the store, 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. 1 79 

and with every return at the annual meeting of 
the stockholders, and other persons interested 
in the stock, they voted a larger and larger sum 
towards library expenses. They engaged a young 
woman to keep the library open every evening 
at first, and eventually it was kept open all the 
time in winter when the mills were not running. 
This made a very long evening. 

I have had a good deal to do with such things 
in different places, and I looked with a good deal 
of interest through the shelves, and afterwards 
over the printed catalogue, to see what class of 
books they had chosen to buy. I was not sur- 
prised to find a very large proportion of children's 
books. Then there was a quite considerable 
branch of books of natural history, and I found, 
on inquiring, that the interest in these studies was 
due to Miss Jane Stevens herself. She had a boy 
come in one night to her schoolroom, who wanted 
a book, and she had the good sense to show one 
of Mr. Nourse's elegant books of illustration, 
which was, as it happened, a series of butterflies 
and other insects which had been collected in 
South America. She told the boy that he and 
his companion might look at the book there, if 
they would be careful. But then she asked if 
they would not like to know something about 
butterflies, and perhaps to collect butterflies, 
and put into their hands a little English book 



l8o HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

not above them, which had some curious studies 
on the habits of caterpillars, moths, and butter- 
flies. The next Saturday afternoon they started 
out, four or five of them, with a butterfly net, 
and the result was quite a little collection. She 
taught some of the girls how to make cages in 
which caterpillars could spin their cocoons. She 
taught some of them how to make for them- 
selves little books in which, as well as they 
could, they drew pictures of the growth of the 
grub from the egg } representing him every three 
days, in fact, till he advanced to his full size. 
Boys and girls took up the new study with a 
great deal of enthusiasm, and the result was 
that there was a great demand for all the " but- 
terfly books," as they called them, which Miss 
Stevens had in store ; and the committee, of 
course, were glad, as far as their means went, 
to let her buy more. As soon as Mr. Nourse 
heard this, he was well pleased. One of the 
girls had made a particularly pretty book of 
studies, and had gone so far as to color her 
caterpillars neatly. This was sent to Mr. 
Nourse as a Christmas present. He was very 
much pleased, and, from that time, kept his eye 
on the catalogues and advertisements, and sup- 
plied the little collection with popular books ; 
and, indeed, with some books of a scientific value 
which would help the children in these lines.. 



THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. l8l 

Miss Stevens told me of this story with a good 
deal of interest, as, indeed, she might ; and from 
his own point of view, Spinner afterwards told 
me the same story, to show that a study which 
could never have been forced upon the com- 
munity as this, introduced itself, as he said, if 
you were only willing to begin at the right end. 

I found that she was in correspondence with 
the Hartford people, the Providence people, with 
Mr. Bowker in New York, and that she kept the 
run of what she wanted, in the way of publica- 
tion and library work, as well as the grandest of 
them do. In short, she assured me, and so did 
Mr. Spinner, that the library was now a very pop- 
ular institution in the place, and that there was 
no danger whatever that the interest in it would 
fall away. They lent very freely, but they en- 
forced their rules regularly ; and they were glad 
to extend their accommodations for reading in 
the building itself, so as to encourage all the 
young people to form habits of reading where, 
of course, they could readily consult books, of 
reference. 

Mr. Raikes, superintendent of the Sunday- 
school, told me that the Sunday-school was a 
different place and a different thing, now that 
he and the other teachers could refer the older 
scholars to such books as they ought to consult, 
and that he was quite sure that when an intelli- 



1 82 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

gent teacher made such a suggestion, the sug- 
gestion would be followed up by application to 
Miss Stevens, or the librarian, for the books 
referred to. She told me that she made it a 
matter of course to have on hand all the books 
required for reference by the Chautauquan Read- 
ing Circle, and that they had, every year, a large 
" home circle "of those readers, who would have 
given her no peace if she had not kept the 
library up to the intelligent requisitions which 
the Chautauquan system of reading demands. 

All this, however, it must be observed, was 
absolutely democratic. The readers themselves 
made the selection of books. They thought they 
knew what they wanted, and if they made a mis- 
take the fault was their own. 



CHAPTER XL 



ENTERTAINMENT. 



HAMPTON made up the whole, or nearly 
the whole, as has been said, of District 
No. 13, in the township in which it belonged, 
so that the management of its school fell almost 
entirely under the oversight of a district com- 
mittee, chosen by the people themselves in 
their annual town meeting. Such is the law of 
that state. A year or two before I was there, 
some showman had come up the valley with an 
exhibition, which had called together, as most 
shows or concerts did, a considerable audience, 
and which had displeased the leaders of the 
community. I should not think they had been 
prudish or over-sensitive about it, from what I 
heard. But Holmes, for instance, said to me, 
very quietly, " It was not such a performance 
as I chose to take my wife and children to see." 
Now a good deal of money goes into the 
pockets of the itinerant showmen, of various 
departments, in a village as prosperous as this. 
And if I class the purveyors of concerts, and 
the gentlemen and ladies who deliver lectures 



184 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

among the showmen, they must not be sur- 
prised. For certainly the announcements, or 
the advertisements, sometimes make it hard to 
distinguish between the entertainments pro- 
posed. 

When there was any talk, serious or light, as 
to the advantages or disadvantages of Hampton 
as a place to live in, it was very apt to come 
round to the discussion of the amusements 
which came there, or which stayed away. In- 
deed, the great problem of this day, and of the 
next generation, is how the congestion of the 
large cities is to be checked, and how the popu- 
lation of the country can be increased. Who- 
ever is interested in this question, and means 
to do anything for its solution, had best con- 
sider, first of all, the questions of public amuse- 
ment or entertainment. For there is no use in 
proving to young people that they can earn 
more wages in a healthy country village than 
in a crowded unhealthy city, if they think the 
city cheerful and gay or the country dull and 
stupid. They do not crowd the cities because 
they think they shall grow rich there, but 
because they want an animated and crowded 
life. Wisely or unwisely, they are tempted by 
the excitement of crowds, of concerts, of bands, 
of theatres, of public meetings, of processions, of 
exhibitions, of parties, of clubs, or, in general, 



ENTERTAINMENT. 1 85 

of society. Whoever will take the trouble to 
listen to the conversation of such young people, 
will see, in five minutes, that the recollection of 
such excitements, or the hope of partaking of 
them, is the inducement which leads them to seek 
city life, or which, after they have sought it, leads 
them to remain in it, in spite of its manifold hard- 
ships. Mrs. Helen Campbell has painted a terri- 
ble picture, not exaggerated, not overcolored in 
a single stroke, which portrays the horrible 
sufferings of the handiworkers of her own sex 
in the city of New York. But whoever asks 
why those poor women remain there, in their 
ill-requited toil, and why they do not go to live 
in that country which God made, with its better 
wages and its lighter work, learns at once that 
the sufficient reason is that they want to stay, 
and do not want to go. More than this, if any 
Aladdin should lift fifty thousand of the poorest 
of them from their wretched tenements to- 
night, and make of them princesses and duch- 
esses, their hard places in their workshops 
would be filled before the week was over by 
fifty thousand other girls who would gladly 
come from the hillsides and valleys, which we 
rightly say are better homes for them. 

Whoever considers the problem thus pre- 
sented, and wants to relieve what we have 
called the congestion of life in the large cities, 



1 86 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

must do what he can to increase the opportuni- 
ties for entertainment, for amusement, yes, for 
excitement, so far as it can reasonably be done, 
for those who live in the country. It is a mis- 
fortune indeed, that, from the nature of the 
case, literature is misleading. Books are gener- 
ally printed in cities, and naturally authors 
gather there. The leading newspapers and 
magazines are, almost of necessity, published 
in such cities. So far as they direct the opinion 
of the young, there is an undercurrent or ground- 
note, which suggests to the young reader that 
in cities is to be found the governing influence 
of the world. The suggestion is probably false, 
but it is none the less seductive to inexperienced 
readers. Thus Mr. Horace Greeley may say, 
"Go West, young man," but the young man ob- 
serves that Mr. Greeley himself remains in New 
York, and naturally enough, if he respects him, 
follows his example rather than his instructions. 
The leading people in the village of Hampton 
knew perfectly well how strong was the under- 
tow of the tide which would carry away their 
young people to larger manufacturing towns, 
or to great commercial cities, if its constant 
sweep was not steadily counteracted. It was 
after the almost disgraceful public entertain- 
ment which has been alluded to, that they took 
distinct measures, quite systematically, to super- 



ENTERTAINMENT. 1 87 

intend the public entertainment by system; 
and the people most interested in this meant 
positive work, and not negative. "We want 
to overcome evil with good," "said Dick Sheri- 
dan, a queer Irishman they had among them, 
who, as it happened, took the oversight of this 
business. A district school meeting in No. 9 
was not generally an affair which greatly inter- 
ested the younger voters, or the people gener- 
ally. But on the occasion alluded to, it had 
been generally reported in the shops and the 
different rooms, that Uncle Dick, as Sheridan 
was called, meant to make a speech. Such a 
thing was quite unheard of, and the meeting was 
crowded with voters and with spectators also, 
who had come to hear the man who, though he 
was the wit or wag of the village, was not 
generally interested in public affairs. 

When the meeting was well under way, Sher- 
idan rose, perfectly serious ; and an excellent 
speech he made. He knew that the boys had 
come with the idea that he would make fun for 
them, and he took care that the boys should be 
disappointed. He spoke, with a good deal of 
feeling, of the impression which the coarse and 
vulgar entertainment had made in the village. 
He said he did not think any one in the village 
was to blame for it, but, for one, he did not mean 
to have the young people so insulted again if he 



1 88 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

could help it. He said also that any one who 
knew him knew that he had no wish to check 
legitimate fun or sport of any kind. He had 
not come to this meeting with any such idea. 
It was here that he used the quotation from St. 
Paul that has been cited, and said that if they 
meant to abate such nuisances they must over- 
come evil with good. 

" That we may have," said he, " such advan- 
tage as legal authority may give us in this mat- 
ter, I propose that the district committee, now 
to be elected, be requested to take the super- 
vision of the public entertainments of this place 
as a part of the public education. I know very 
well how much and how little this vote may 
mean under the law of this state. But I know, 
also, that it will mean a great deal in this com- 
munity if it is passed, as I believe it will be, 
unanimously. 

" My idea is, that instead of a district school- 
committee of three, such as we usually choose, 
we shall this year make a committee of ten. I 
propose that we re-elect the last year's committee 
of three, and add to it three gentlemen and four 
ladies. I propose that, besides the supervision 
of our school, they communicate with the select- 
men of this town as to the persons who receive 
licenses for public entertainment. If they ap- 
prove, on the whole, of such persons, all right. 



ENTERTAINMENT. 1 89 

If they find another such case as that of these 
minstrels we had here last month, why, they will 
say so to the people who have halls to let here, 
and I do not think that, when they have said so, 
anybody in this town will let such a man a hall." 
Here there was some applause. But Dick Sheri- 
dan went steadily on. " But I do not mean to 
stop here." He meant that this committee, — ■ 
and when he said committee he really meant 
himself, — should take boldly and bodily the 
positive direction and provision for the amuse- 
ments of the place. He had thought of this 
before a good deal, and was not sorry to under- 
take to carry out some of his own plans. He 
was quite clear that, with a little money in hand, 
so that fit contracts could be made with the 
right persons, he could induce performers or 
artists of high character to come to Hampton 
for the entertainment of the people. He did 
not even dare to show his own committee at 
first his plans in detail, so bold were they. But 
he was one of those men who has his eyes open 
to such things ; he was constitutionally fond 
of public entertainment himself, and had never 
succeeded very well in enjoying himself when 
he was all alone for four or five hours in an 
evening, even if you gave him the most enter- 
taining books for company. He was a social 
fellow, who liked to be in a crowd, and he knew, 



I9O HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

almost by instinct, those people who, by genius 
or education, were able to call such persons to- 
gether. He said there were good actors who 
would give recitals and presentations, that there 
were good artists who would draw amusing or 
instructive pictures at sight for audiences, that 
there were musicians, vocal or instrumental, who 
were only waiting to be employed, and that the 
person who could control these people was 
a permanent and official manager with a little 
money in his hand. He said that this class of 
people were, of their very nature, singularly 
poor business men ; he said that if a business 
man met with them, he had them, so to speak, 
at an advantage. Now Sheridan did not want to 
cheat them ; he did want to pay them fair wages 
for fair work ; and he wanted to entertain the peo- 
ple of Hampton at the same time. All this he 
had thought out himself. Ail this he knew he 
could persuade his committee to try, or he thought 
he knew it. And he made this speech with a view 
to having that sort of authority given to him that 
he could go forward with courage, and that nobody 
could say that Dick Sheridan was putting himself 
into an affair with which he had nothing to do. 
So soon as Sheridan had spoken, my friend 
Holmes, he of the cabbage and strawberries, 
spoke, and to the same purpose, though in quite 
a different way. I fancy that they had not had 



ENTERTAINMENT. I9I 

much to do with each other before, and that it 
was rather a surprise, perhaps an amusement to 
the youngsters present, to see them advocating 
the same cause at the same meeting. Holmes 
was recognized as a religious man. He had a 
Bible class on Sunday, and was, I believe, 
thought strict in the charge of his children. 
Nobody ever called Dick Sheridan strict, and, 
though he was a very decent member of the 
community, as far as his daily manners and 
customs went, nobody would have classed him 
among distinctly religious men. If he was dis- 
tinguished for anything, it was for a tradition 
that he had once been a pitcher in a celebrated 
ball-club, and that he always interested himself 
in the sports of such clubs in Hampton and in 
Wentworth. 

The motion, however, was no surprise to the 
leader of the meeting, or to the fathers of fam- 
ilies who were interested in the schools. It had 
been carefully arranged beforehand, in the horns 
talk which makes the genuine " preliminary 
meeting" in New England politics, and, with 
little other discussion than has been described, 
it was passed unanimously. The three dis- 
trict committeemen of the last year were 
chosen again. To them were added three men 
and four women, as Sheridan had proposed. 
He was one of the men, Holmes was another, 



192 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

and young Brahm, who was the first bass on 
the glee-club and president of the ball-club, was 
the third ; Miss Jane Stevens, who has been 
already spoken of, was one of the women. 

So soon as the committee was organized, it 
was clear that Dick Sheridan " meant work." 
He was in correspondence with this band and 
that quartette. He was away in New York for 
two or three days, and there were even rumors 
that he had a personal interview with Mr. 
Beecher, to persuade him to come to Hamp- 
ton to lecture. What he did, and what he was 
said to do, kept the talkers of Hampton busy 
for the next six weeks, and the newspapers in 
Wentworth and Alton even took up the story 
of the achievements of this committee. What 
followed was, as he himself explained to me, 
that never was there a course of entertainments 
so well advertised as this first course of con- 
certs, lectures, and readings. " From that time, 
Mr. Freeman," he said to me, "we were made. 
We made on that one course, — oh, more than 
two hundred dollars clear profit, — just because 
it was a new thing, and everybody was talking 
about us. There is plenty of money spent on 
these things always. The trouble is, that very 
little of it, in comparison, goes to modest peo- 
ple, who will not blow, and a great deal of it 



ENTERTAINMENT. I93 

goes to liars and tramps, who skin the business, 
and never mean to come again. 

" We had over two hundred dollars in hand. 
We appointed a permanent trustee and treas- 
urer to keep it for us and to keep the accounts. 
Then, you see, when I went to engage an orches- 
tra, or a quartette, or anybody, I could talk busi- 
ness. I did not have to say that if the night 
were good they would have so much, and if it 
were bad we could only pay the expenses. I 
said 'twenty dollars,' or 'thirty dollars,' or 'fifty 
dollars,' or whatever, and they knew I meant it. 
We controlled the hall. All we had to pay for 
that, — well, you know about that, — was light 
and heat, and our per cent to Mr. Nourse on 
his plant. And then, — well, these people are 
not fools ; they know a good thing from a bad 
one ; and all that was needed was, that we 
should be able to make to them fair proposals, 
to pay them money in advance, if the poor fel- 
lows needed it, but, above all things, to pay 
them on the nail, as soon as they had given 
their entertainment." 

Sheridan added, modestly enough, that there 
was a good deal in approaching these people in 
the right way. He said : " I might have stroked 
all the fur back, and had them all dislike me. 
As it stands, do you know, I think they like 
me better than almost any person they have to 



194 H0W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

deal with. I have never cheated them, as some 
'impressarios' would have done, by making very 
large promises, which they could never fulfil. I 
have never degraded them by speaking as if I 
were hiring them for some menial service. I 
have always seen that, when they came here, 
they should be treated as well as a clergyman 
would be if he came here. I have always made 
them understand that I considered them as 
co-operating with the best people of this place, 
for the highest interests of this place. I have 
made it my business to see that they were cour- 
teously and cordially treated by our best citi- 
zens when they were here, and I tried to make 
Hampton so agreeable to them that they would 
want to come again. The consequence is that 
they like to come ; they will put themselves out 
of the way to come here for me, even though I 
pay them much less than they are paid in some 
other places. You can not, Mr. Freeman," he 
said, in conclusion, " overestimate the advan- 
tage of dealing with authority in a permanent 
position, so that you can look forward and re- 
member the past as well, and, above all things, 
the advantage of having some money in the 
pocket." 

I said, with some admiration of the man, that 
they also had the great advantage of a stage 
manager who did not want to be paid. Sheridan 



ENTERTAINMENT. I95 

laughed, and took the compliment good-na- 
turedly. 

" I like to see the thing well done. I had 
talked about such a thing for years, and I meant 
to make it succeed, now I had a chance. But 
the others backed me up well. That little Miss 
Stevens, now, — there's a great deal more of 
her than you think for. And then, the people 
themselves, they meant to have it succeed. I 
tell you, it was Democracy applied to Entertain- 
ment, just as the whole business here is Demo- 
cracy applied to spinning and weaving. The 
secret of Democracy in anything, Mr. Freeman, 
is not any magic written down on a sheet of 
paper, and called a constitution. It is that 
everybody wants the machine to move, and so 
makes it move, and does his share. That is 
just what those people saw. They paid their 
money freely, because they knew it was their 
.concern. They did not care for profit so much 
as they cared for success. 

" Well ! I started from the first for variety- 
And I never pretended to be instructive. I 
told Miss Jane Stevens to keep her instruction 
at school, — that she was to be made to laugh 
herself, — that we were to entertain them. She's 
no fool, and she laughed and said that was all 
right, — and she has been a real help, as I tell 
you. Variety, I said, and all entertainment, 



I96 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

and do not be too grand. For the autumn and 
winter, we tried first for two entertainments a 
week, and afterwards for three. But we also 
tried not to interfere. If they wanted, at the 
church, to have a lecture or meeting or anything, 
they let us know in advance, and we kept out 
of their way. ' Courses?' Oh, yes, — we have 
some 'courses. A good course is a good thing. 
It is a mutual insurance, — a good night takes 
care of a bad one, and a bright speaker draws, 
if you have made a mistake, and engaged a dull 
one for another evening. But we were not 
limited to courses. We kept our eyes open, and 
our ears. If a man, or a troupe, or a band, were 
coming to Wentworth or to Norwich, we let 
them understand that there was sure pay, if 
not quite so much, if they would come round 
to us. We would have them Monday, — that 
was all the same to us. But perhaps you do 
not know that Monday is a bad day for show- 
men generally." 

In this way, partly because Mr. Sheridan and 
his committee had the eclat of a new beginning, 
the first season was very profitable, and the 
trustee-treasurer had quite a sum in hand at 
the end of the first winter. Then it was that, 
to the surprise of every one, he announced a 
change of base, and carried it in his committee. 
He proposed that three-fourths of this money 



ENTERTAINMENT. 1 97 

should be spent for the open-air entertainments 
of the summer. So much help was to be given 
to the ball-club and the tennis-club. So much 
was to be spent for evening concerts in the 
square. And, as the money was everybody's 
money, it was agreed that a part of it should be 
used to negotiate with the railroad companies, 
to provide for two all-day excursions, by which 
those who started early and returned late might 
have a long day at Sachem's Head, on the Sound. 

" In the end," Sheridan said, " the excursions 
have not cost us one cent. I mean the people 
have bought tickets enough to pay for the whole 
thing. But it is with the railroad as it is with 
the orchestras. They want a sure thing. They 
are glad enough to sell me a train, and to sell it 
to me low, if I have the money. But if it comes 
to 'if and 'perhaps,' — if they are to take the 
risk, — why, they want the possible profit, as 
well as the possible loss. So I never have of- 
fered them any doubtful enterprise. I have 
said, ' I will take four cars, or six,' as the case 
may be. And you can see that, after one suc- 
cess, we are wellnigh sure. If we were not 
sure, why, we have something in the bank to 
fall back upon. 

" Now," he said, " I am really well known 
among the large fraternity of people who amuse 
and entertain the rest of the world. The right 



I98 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

sort know me. They address me ; I do not 
have to hunt them up. They know the terms 
are cash down, but they also know that we shall 
stand no nonsense. In these last years we have 
had the hall open nearly sixty times in three 
months, from November first to February, and 
in the other months almost as often. And we 
have had some of the best talent in the country 
here. Two secrets, Mr. Freeman, — cash on 
the nail and constant variety. But we could 
never have had the cash had it not been Democ- 
racy applied to Entertainment." 



This matter of public amusement or enter- 
tainment played so important a part in the 
social life of this little community that we fre- 
quently came round to it in conversation. From 
all my nearest friends there I heard a good deal 
about the practical working of their plans, and 
I satisfied myself that Sheridan had not over- 
stated either their success or their importance. 

In any such enterprise as this, the perma- 
nency of the population is a matter to be very 
carefully provided for. It is, indeed, quite essen- 
tial that the greater part of the community shall 
remain where they are, shall maintain the local 
pride or esprit de corps of the place, and that 
thus the works shall train their own workmen, 



ENTERTAINMENT. 1 99 

as Spinner once and again said to me. In all 
that I had learned about the store, I had seen 
that its success absolutely depended on its free- 
dom from any vagary of public opinion, which 
should set any considerable number of those 
who shared in it upon some emigration project, 
for which they would want to withdraw, of a sud- 
den, their capital. The danger of removal was 
distinctly visible here, but, as Holmes said again 
and again, it was just as great in every other 
relation of their life, and their success was al- 
ways just as much impaired by the " flitting " 
of good hands, though the danger might not be 
so apparent upon the surface. " New men do not 
care anything about you." "New hands take 
on airs." "New hands spoil the machinery." 
"New hands, — new ways." Such saws were 
repeated to me again and again. 

" I do not say," said Spinner, "that I want to 
build up a community of my namesakes here, 
or of weavers. I don't take much stock in Mr. 
Atkinson's theory of the heredity of good weav- 
ing. However that may be, I want the boys 
and girls to choose the calling that God made 
them for, whatever that may be. But among 
those callings open to them, is this of weaving 
good woollen cloth. It is an honorable and 
profitable way of serving the world, as honor- 
able and profitable as any. I do mean that my 



200 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

boys and girls shall not be ashamed of their 
father's business, and that if they use it, they 
shall carry it on to advantage. They may go on 
a wander-tour if they want to, as lads like to do, 
when their time comes. But I want to have 
them come back here, and I want to have this 
place as attractive as any place they will find." 

Substantially the same thing was said by the 
other leaders of the little community. And they 
were young enough themselves, and remem- 
bered enough of their own youth, to know what 
would make a town attractive to young people, 
and what were the features of its life to which 
the memory of a wanderer would return. They 
knew that its social attractions would count for 
more than money wages, and for more than any 
prospect, even, of rapid promotion. To have 
" had a good time," as the happy old English of 
Dryden's time put it, — this is a thing which 
young people remember, and to the renewal of 
it they look forward. 

And I was well pleased one day to find that 
Mr. Sherlock took the same view. He picked 
me up, with my basket of fish, one day when he 
was driving, and he talked to me very seriously 
of all this. He told me that he had an excellent 
set of young people in Hampton, and that he 
ascribed that very much to the watchful care 
which had been kept, from the beginning almost, 



ENTERTAINMENT. 201 

over the public entertainments of the young. 
" Lead us not into temptation " means a great 
deal. And he declared that the temptations 
opened to young life, in the carelessness which 
too often neglects this matter in the cities and 
towns of the country, seemed to him to be the 
enemies of Christian life most frequent, most 
subtle, and most to be dreaded. If he probed 
to the bottom the history of the moral decline 
and ruin of any young man or young woman, he 
was most apt to find that in the good-natured 
negligence in which parents had left boy or girl 
to hear or to see this or that, which broke up 
all early principles of purity, was to be found 
the beginning of the difficulty. Sheridan was 
right when he told the people to overcome evil 
with good. There was nothing else to overcome 
it with, and the field in which he was at work 
was by no means insignificant. 



CHAPTER XII. 



TEMPERANCE. 



WE were sitting in the counting-room one 
day, when both Mr. Spinner and Mr. 
Workman seemed to have finished their after- 
noon work, and I asked them how they coped 
with the great devil of all. 

" You mean liquor." It was Workman who 
replied. "Well, we try to overcome evil with 
good. All the conditions are in our favor, and 
we have had more success than I would have 
dared to hope. 

" In the first' place, — well, I do not know as 
you know I have the whole responsibility of the 
help ; our friend Spinner does not interfere with 
me there, — I will not have a drinking man or 
woman on the premises." 

"Plenty of them apply," said Spinner, groan- 
ing. " Show Mr. Freeman that letter which 
you had from Dr. Good — " 

" No, I will not stop to show it to him. But 
I will tell him. It was a letter begging me 
to take a family here which was broken down 
because the man could not keep from whiskey. 



TEMPERANCE. 203 

Dr. Good had lectured here, he knew his friend 
could have no whiskey here, and he wanted to 
send him to us as to a hospital. 

"I do not know what you will think, but I 
would not take him, though I believe he under- 
stood his business. I am not sure if I was right. 
I wrote Dr. Good the best letter I could, but I 
did not quite satisfy myself. 

" But the ground I take is, that I must care 
first for these children and young people on the 
ground. I will not lead them into temptation, 
and the difficulty is so tremendous that I will be 
on the guard everywhere." 

Workman spoke with so much feeling that I 
have no doubt there was a skeleton somewhere 
in his own house, reminding him of his duty in 
this matter, as there is, indeed, in most houses. 

" Literature is bad enough," he went on to 
say. "The descriptions of drinking, as if it 
were the crowning height of a man's life, the 
talk of wine, as if it were the highest article of 
manufacture, — and this in good books, which 
the young people ought to read, — this makes a 
sort of mysterious joy hang over the thing, which 
the devil must delight in. The newspapers, as 
you know, are quite unreliable about it. Read 
between the lines, and see if the man who re- 
ported Neal Dow did not write out his notes in a 
bar-room. My boys and girls have to meet all 



204 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

that, at the best. And I did not want to have a 
man here who might be devising plans to bring 
liquor in, or even going down to Wentworth with 
one of the young men to see what they could 
find there. 

" I run this mill as a place for the working- 
men and women first. After we have done this," 
he said, laughing, " if we can turn out a few yards 
of Hampton A No. I, why, I do so, because 
Spinner there is so eager about it. But, on the 
whole, that is of little consequence in compari- 
son. And, Mr. Freeman, when you can get 
Congress to understand that the principal busi- 
ness they have in hand, or any honest man, is 
that same affair, — namely, that the people of 
this country shall be decent men and women, 
living in happy homes, — you will have made a 
great step. Your tariff legislation, all your 
revenue legislation, all your legislation on post- 
office and telegraph, for a little instance, ought 
to turn on that, and that only. 

"Well, to come back to your question. I 
think all the conditions are in our favor, as I 
said. It was a great thing that, for years, each 
man and woman had to scrimp and save one- 
quarter of his wages really, — that is to say, was 
compelled to save it, and to deposit it, instead 
of having it to spend. That put us on a very 
economical style of living at first, and whiskey 



TEMPERANCE. 205 

must go, even tobacco largely, because we had 
so little money, any of us. 

" In the second place, almost all the leaders — 
I mean the men with families, who would be apt 
to stick fast and make up public sentiment — 
were already total abstainers. This happened 
from the law of selection. For nobody could 
well join us to go to work on three-quarter 
wages, unless he had something laid up in the 
bank. And a drinking man is not apt to have a 
large bank account. 

"Then, so soon as we got on the eight-hour 
time schedule, nobody had the plea, which is a 
perfectly just plea, of exhaustion. No man had 
a ' pocket-pistol,' or wanted to step round to a 
saloon because he was dead beat out by being on 
his feet all day, or by whatever else he had had 
to do. Family men went home ; the boys, by 
which I mean all the younger hands, went round 
to their clubs, or to the reading-room, or to the 
gymnasium, after Sheridan started it, or to play 
ball, or croquet, or tennis. The open air is 
always a good stimulus. What did that old 
Quaker say to you, Spinner ? " 

" He said, ' Tell them to plant trees. Interest 
them in planting trees. They will become so 
excited and fascinated as they watch the trees 
that they will have no disposition to drink.' 
Dear old soul ! He judged everybody by himself." 



206 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

"Yes," said Workman, "but there was an 
element of truth in the remark, as old Dr. Con- 
verse used to say. Keep a young fellow in high 
exercise, in good health, and in open air, and the 
temptation of liquor is reduced to a minimum. 
After three or four generations of such life there 
will be little or none." 

" We encourage, in every way, — I think Miss 
Jane Stevens and Mr. Ledger have shown you 
that, — all associations of the young people which 
will give the stimulus of society in place of the 
stimulus of liquor. The mistake about such 
things is, that your Useful Knowledge kind of 
people think that everybody wants to be learn- 
ing something all the time. That is all non- 
sense. The appetite for learning can be satis- 
fied, just as the appetite for roast beef can be 
satisfied, — and when it is satisfied, it is non- 
sense to try to revive it till the time comes. 
Here is where Dick Sheridan helps us, — more, 
perhaps, than he thought when he began. He 
was not satisfied that the boys should play 
cricket and base-ball, without giving their moth- 
ers and sisters and sweethearts comfortable 
shady seats where they could sit and see them. 
He encouraged with all his might the Knights 
Templars, so that they established that restau- 
rant where I met you yesterday." 



TEMPERANCE. 207 

"The Take it Easy" I said ; "I was delighted 
with the name." 

They both laughed. " That is one of Dick's 
notions. He had it on the brain. He said that 
the hands must learn not to hurry when they 
ate, or as they amused themselves. Well, the 
Take it Easy is a Co-operation enterprise. I 
really believe they pay a dividend at the end of 
the year to everybody who drinks a glass of soda 
or eats a bowl of oysters. Sheridan joined in 
with the Knights with all his zeal to have it 
carried through, and it is really now a great com- 
fort and convenience to us all. 

" You see it was the old stage-house of the 
place, even before there were any mills here. 
A great square brick tavern, probably a great 
deal too large at its best. We have almost no 
travellers or visitors. In the old regime here, 
they made it pay, somehow, by keeping the bar 
pretty active. We had abolished all that. 

"Accordingly, very soon after we were in full 
blast, the owners came to me to know what we 
would do with it. I did not choose to be em- 
barrassed by them or their notions, and Spinner 
agreed with me. We took it off" their hands at 
a very low price, and it is now a part of the 
property of this company. Then we took the 
same ground which we took about the store 
and about the tenements. We meant to make 



208 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

our money by manufacturing goods. Our other 
property must pay us the ' idiot's dividend ' 
and the taxes. So the Knights Templars under- 
took to swing this thing. They have their own 
club-rooms there, — they have a chess-room, 
where they play more checkers and backgam- 
mon than chess, I think, — they have a billiard- 
room, — they have their own reading-room. But 
gradually the restaurant grew, and it now takes, 
as you saw, the whole ground floor. The men 
sit there and talk politics, and discuss boat-races 
and ball games. It is a place of resort. You 
can order something to drink, just as in old 
times. But it is one of Eaton's fifty-seven tem- 
perance drinks, and nobody has a headache the 
next morning. 

"Eaton sent them up the man they have there, 
and he and his wife have a genius for making 
the place attractive. In the first place, their 
things are good. Their coffee is matchless, and 
their bouillon. Well, the place is pretty, — there 
are always fresh flowers, and in summer it is 
cool, and in winter it is warm. There is a room 
where the women can look in, and be by them- 
selves, and have a cup of tea if they choose. 
They are not locked out, and come and go as the 
rest of us do. That gives it all a home look. 
It breaks up all temptation to have little sepa- 
rate ' treats ' in little dirty club-rooms, that Good- 



TEMPERANCE. 



209 



year here will give any party a much better 
entertainment than anybody else can, and it 
costs them less. 

"Now, observe, all this goes forward as a 
thing of course. But it is not a thing of course. 
You do not usually find what is called a temper- 
ance hotel to approach the Take it Easy in ele- 
gance or neatness or attractiveness. But noth- 
ing is said about liquor, more than anything 
would be said about opium at Delmonico's. 
They would not assure their guests there that 
no opium was served, — and Goodyear does not 
assure his guests that no liquor is served. 
' They take it for granted,' he says, — ' they take 
it for granted that I know how to keep a place 
of resort for gentlemen/ " 

So much for what Workman meant by over- 
coming evil by good. But all of them said, very 
seriously, that an active temperance "propa- 
ganda " was necessary, all the same. Holmes 
said to me that he knew what temptations his 
boys and girls were to meet, and he wanted them 
to be forewarned. They had the best temperance 
speakers, and had them often. The Women's 
Christian Temperance Union had a branch there, 
the Templars, and some of the ether societies. 
The boys and girls grew up with the feeling that 
when they left Hampton to live in larger places, 
where there was much temptation, and where 



2IO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

they saw the open sale of liquor at the bar, that 
they were, in some sort, the apostles of a new 
order. They had something of the pride which 
the graduate of a well-equipped college has, when 
he descends among what he thinks, for the time, 
inferior people. 

They wanted, if they could, to do their part 
in extending a system which they had learned 
to love. If they had not had this positive wish 
to be of use in the temperance cause, all the 
negative effect of the plans which had been 
made for them would have been useless. But, 
as they did wish to help their comrades, they 
themselves were the more sure. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 



UNDER the old order of things at Hamp- 
ton, before Thankful Nourse and Spinner 
bought the property, there had been an old- 
fashioned Savings Bank. Such institutions 
have been very generally established in the 
New England factory-towns, to the very great 
advantage of all concerned. The administra- 
tion of them has generally been careful and 
honorable. The supervision by the authorities 
of the states is severe and close, and there have 
not been many instances in which the depositors 
have lost anything by the infidelity of the cus- 
todians or by their carelessness. On the other 
hand, the custom of depositing money even in 
very small sums in these banks has become gen- 
eral, it would be almost fair to say universal. 
In the state of Massachusetts, with a population 
of 1,976,264, there were last year 906,039 dif- 
ferent accounts in these institutions. This 
shows that almost every working man and 
working woman must have had an account in 
one of them or another. The average sum to 



212 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

the credit of each depositor was $321.00, the 
largest deposit permitted by the law being 
$5000.00. The total amount was $291,197,- 
900.96. 1 Persons who have more money to 
deposit are expected to place it in other invest- 
ments. 

The success of the savings bank system in 
America is largely due to the spirit in which it 
was conceived. The history of these banks 
shows that they were not founded in the miser- 
able idea of some bold speculator, who foresaw 
the immense sums which would be at the direc- 
tion of their managers, and was eager to con- 
trol the investment of these funds. They were, 
on the other hand, set on foot by high-minded 
Christian people, who were eager in their wish 
to improve the condition of poor people, to give 
to them the same rights in the use of their little 
earnings which the rich had in the use of theirs, 
and to encourage, in whatever way might be 
possible, habits of prudence among the work- 
people around them. It is the proud boast of 
one of the associations of clergymen in Massa- 
chusetts that the savings bank of the county, 
one of the oldest in the state, was created by 
the inspiration given at a "Minister's Meeting," 
as the phrase of New England calls the meeting 

1 The figures are for 1886. 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 213 

of the association. 1 The plan was proposed by 
the wife of one of the ministers, herself in at- 
tendance. She had read of the success of a 
similar plan set on foot among the philanthropic 
people of England. 

In this spirit, to borrow Mr. Sherlock's text 
again, those who had succeeded in business life 
are willing to bear the burdens of those who are 
yet to begin it. And to their willingness is due 
the willingness of men of great business ability 
to give their time and care to the administration 
of these trusts, without compensation. It is 
considered almost a point of honor among mer- 
cantile men or bankers of ability and position, 
to do their part in the proper supervision of the 
savings banks of their towns. It will some- 
times happen, undoubtedly, that a needy adven- 
turer thinks it would be a good plan to establish 
a new savings bank, of which he may be the. 
acting manager, with a good salary and the 
advantages which fall to a man who directs 
large investments. But if the bank is to suc- 
ceed, it must be able to show the names of a 
board of directors respected in the community 
for business sagacity and honor. The adven- 
turer who proposes it may sing never so sweetly, 
and advertise never so widely. His bank will 

1 The Worcester Association. 



214 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

not attract many depositors until they know who 
is to have the oversight of their money. 

The direction of savings banks, then, so 
that the depositors may be sure of a fair in- 
come, and that their funds are not wasted, 
becomes one of the unpaid public duties of 
Christian men, who know that all their time 
and talents are given to them as a trust, and 
who mean to use that trust for the benefit of 
their fellows. 

The little bank at Hampton, under the old ad- 
ministration of the mills there, had been well ad- 
ministered, and had kept its fair share of deposits 
from the savings of the work-people. But when 
hard times came, as the pay-days were more 
uncertain, and when at last the old company 
failed, the people had moved away, one after 
another, and had, of course, withdrawn their 
deposits, — perhaps, alas ! to pay the charges of 
moving ; or, at best, to deposit them in banks 
nearer to their new homes. As the managers 
of the mills left, they had withdrawn, so soon as 
they could, from their places on the board of 
administration, and the Savings Bank was little 
more than a name and a sign on the wall of the 
bank building, when the renewal of Hampton 
began. 

Mr. Spinner told me that, as soon as he got 
the machinery into working order, he called 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 21 5 

Mr. Nourse's attention to the necessity of 
awakening new confidence in the bank, and 
found, to his satisfaction, that he saw the neces- 
sity plainly. Whatever else he thought visionary 
or fanciful, in the notions and wishes of these 
working people, he did not think any plans for 
saving money fanciful. He knew too well that 
he should never have been a capatalist had he 
not, as he said, " salted down " ten per cent of 
his income, since he had sold a string of trout 
at a hotel for a quarter of a dollar. On Mr. 
Spinner's appeal, therefore, he agreed to be 
one of the trustees of the bank, knowing that 
he could attend to that duty without personal 
attendance at all the meetings of the managers. 
And he interested himself personally in induc- 
ing gentlemen of position, character, and means 
in the neighborhood, to take necessary trust 
and care of its management. When they took 
the bank in hand, the deposits were at the very 
lowest ebb. £u._, with the improvement in the 
prosperity of Hampton, the working men and 
women, and even the children, began to open 
their accounts. The bank received as small 
sums as five cents at a time, and began to allow 
interest on the first of every month after the 
deposit was made. It does not take long to 
teach young people what is the value of an 
arrangement by which their little wealth grows 



2l6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

while they are asleep, or seems to do so. And, 
with the steadiness of management, and the evi- 
dent care taken of their property by men who 
were among the most distinguished in the neigh- 
borhood, almost all the people of Hampton were 
disposed to place their earnings, as far as they 
could save them, for a few months in the keep- 
ing of the savings bank. 

Spinner said that, so far, their experience was 
only the same as that of hundreds of other insti- 
tutions of the same kind in different parts of the 
northern states, and he said that he did not 
know but that their bank would have remained 
exactly like all other American savings banks, 
but from the accident that they had a German 
named Scheffer at the head of the dyeing- 
room. Scheffer came to Spinner one day in 
a good deal of indignation, and it was some 
time before Spinner found out what the matter 
was. The German had been a depositor in the 
bank from the very beginning, and this, Spinner, 
who was one of the directors, knew perfectly 
well. His wife was another, a nephew he had 
was another, a grown-up son had a small de- 
posit, and one or two of the children had bank 
books also, with their little savings entered 
upon them. Spinner had always supposed that 
Scheffer was one of the people best satisfied 
with the arrangements of the bank, as he had 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 217 

often heard him speak, in a cordial way, of the 
simplicity and dignity with which its business 
was conducted. He was all the more surprised 
on this particular occasion, which proved to be a 
critical occasion, to find that Scheffer was in a 
rage with the whole management of the institu- 
tion, had given notice that he should with- 
draw his funds on the first possible day when 
he had the right to do so, and that every one in 
his room would do the same. Spinner soothed 
him as well as he could, made him tell the 
whole story from the beginning to the end, 
and then was amazed to find that the German 
was disappointed and disgusted because the 
treasurer of the bank had refused to discount 
a little note for him. 

Spinner at once entered on an explanation, 
in as moderate and gentle language as he 
could, to show his German friend that such a 
thing was utterly unheard of in the savings 
banks of New England as a small discount 
on a small note, given on personal security. 
He tried to make Scheffer understand that 
the general policy, from the beginning of 
these institutions, had been to avoid any re- 
semblance to the working of the ordinary banks 
of discount, and that they had been adminis- 
tered also as trust funds, in which, naturally 
enough, the larger the investment the better 



2l8 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

for the persons concerned, because there is the 
less expense of handling and oversight. He 
cited to him that remark of Josiah Quincy's, 
which has been already quoted in another part 
of this essay. He said, with some humor, that 
the palaces of Boston were built with the 
money of the servant-girls of Boston. It is 
perfectly true that those servant-girls have 
given to the great savings banks the money 
which those banks lend out, on the perfect 
security of mortgages, on the palaces of which 
Mr. Quincy was speaking. Spinner tried to 
explain to his angry friend that if he wanted a 
little money, he himself would gladly be his 
security on a note which he could carry to the 
nearest bank of discount, which was at Went- 
worth, the large town of the neighborhood. 
He told him that he would find that he was 
perfectly well known to the directors there, 
and that they would be very glad to accommo- 
date him, if he would take such a note as he 
proposed. Spinner said to him : " I had occa- 
sion to borrow a little money a fortnight ago, 
and I went over there, with a note indorsed 
by Freeman, and they lent me the money gladly. 
That is what they are for, and that is the place 
for you to go to." 

Scheffer was toned down a little when he 
found that his character had not been intention- 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 219 

ally assailed by the treasurer of the bank, and 
was soothed, as Spinner persuaded him that his 
reputation had extended as far as Wentworth 
and farther. But when the first tempest of his 
rage was over, he continued to talk on the 
subject, and to show what he thought the nar- 
rowness of the restriction by which the treas- 
urer had been bound. He then told Spinner, 
what Spinner told me he did not know before, 
that in his own country, the bank of savings 
where he made his deposits would have been 
at the same time a bank of discount, not in 
general business, but restricted to a business 
with those very persons who made the deposits. 
He explained to him the system, simple enough 
in operation, though a little complicated in de- 
scription, by which the bank secured itself abso- 
lutely for the small loans which it made to its 
depositors. It might happen that a man wanted, 
for temporary purposes, such as the furnishing 
of his house, or the education of one of his 
children, a sum of money larger than he had 
himself on deposit in the bank. He would want 
to borrow this money, and he would have friends 
enough among the other depositors who were 
confident in his integrity, or confident in the 
purpose for which he needed the funds, to assist 
him with their credit, as far as it would go. 
What is the measure of such people's credit ? 



220 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Clearly enough it is, so far as the bank is con- 
cerned, estimated with perfect accuracy by the 
deposits which they have in that institution. 
If, then, SchefTer wanted to borrow five hundred 
dollars, as in this case he did want to borrow 
that amount, if he had on deposit only three 
hundred dollars, the bank would, with perfect 
willingness, lend him the whole sum, if he would 
bring them a note signed by himself and by two 
of his companions, each of whom had deposits 
of the same amount with his own, it being 
understood upon the face of the note that they 
were not to draw upon their deposits until the 
note was paid, and that the note constituted 
a lien, of which the bank could avail itself as 
security for these indorsements. Of course no 
security could be more absolute. The bank 
itself holds the very property from which the 
debt could be paid, if it should prove that the 
indorsers must be called upon. SchefTer ex- 
plained to Spinner, what Spinner did not know, 
that there were thousands of such banks in 
Germany, carrying on the double business of 
receiving small deposits, and making small loans 
to the depositors. 

It is perfectly true to say, in theory, that the 
ordinary New England system comes out at 
the same thing. In the ordinary New England 
system, the depositor places his money in the 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 221 

savings bank, the savings bank loans the money 
in considerable sums to capitalists and others 
who handle considerable sums, and the bank 
and the depositor then receive the advantage 
of the interest paid upon such loans. If it 
happens that the depositor wants bank accom- 
modation, he goes to an entirely different insti- 
tution, — as in this case Scheff er would have to 
go to the bank of discount at Wentworth, — and 
he avails himself there of such credit as he has, 
founded upon his property or upon his reputa- 
tion, and borrows the money he needs. Or, 
without borrowing money, he withdraws the 
whole of his deposit, uses that in his specula- 
tion, whatever it is, and when the speculation 
is ended, makes his deposit anew. But it is 
easy to see that all this means in practice is, 
that it shall be difficult, not to say impossible, 
for dealers in money on a small scale to obtain 
money at banks of discount. The banks of 
discount do not want such customers ; human 
nature is weak, and the average cashier of a 
bank prefers to deal with large customers than 
with small customers, and to have its business 
conducted in large sums than in small sums. 
In practice, therefore, a man who wants to 
borrow small sums of money is obliged to bor- 
row, in the expensive and cumbrous system 
which sends him to a pawnbroker, and his range 



222 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

of credit is only as large as that very limited 
range which can be represented by the articles 
which he can put in deposit as security for his 
loan. 

The German system, on the other hand, gives 
to the man exactly the credit that he is entitled 
to. It enables his friends, though they be in 
the humblest walks of life, and be persons of 
very little means, to come to his assistance, for 
whatever purpose he needs money, just as far 
as their means will go and they are disposed. 
In this particular case of Scheffer's, where his 
anger had been so intensely excited by the 
refusal of the treasurer, he had offered to the 
treasurer absolute security for every cent he 
wanted to borrow, and had offered it to him in 
the very simple form of proposing to place with 
him the bank books of his friends, amounting 
to a sum much larger than that he proposed to 
borrow. The treasurer had refused, because he 
was not in the habit of doing such things. This 
reason, usually alleged by persons in such posi- 
tions, had not satisfied Scheffer, and hence his 
towering rage. 

It was in every way desirable to conciliate 
Scheffer in this particular instance. The direc- 
tors of the bank did not want to have one im- 
portant sub-department of the bank alienated, 
nor did they want to have the German part 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 223 

of their constituency disaffected to their man- 
agement. Mr. Spinner, therefore, brought the 
matter up at the next directors' meeting. And, 
in the first place, it was voted that the security 
offered by Mr. Scheffer for the loan he wanted 
was entirely satisfactory, and that the treasurer 
be directed to lend to him the amount he asked 
for, as soon as he had that amount for use. 
But, what was much more important, a com- 
mittee was appointed, which should draw up a 
practicable plan, in which any one of the de- 
positors might borrow money in small sums if 
he needed, even though the sum asked for was 
larger than he had on deposit himself, if he 
offered the names, as his indorsers, of men 
who had themselves deposits equal to the 
amount borrowed ; these depositors giving the 
amount they had in the bank as their security 
for the fulfilment of their obligation. All this, 
of course, made it necessary to open some new 
books, and, indeed, developed a side of the 
bank which was not contemplated in the sys- 
tem to which it belonged. But it did not prove 
that it required any new legislation, for these 
banks always had the power to lend money on 
personal security, if this security were satisfac- 
tory to the directors, and were such that they 
could readily call in the amount which they had 
lent, when the exigencies of the bank required. 



224 H0W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Clearly enough, no security could be better than 
that which these directors had, for the funds of 
the indorsers and the principal were in their 
own keeping, and they were responsible for 
them. 

The old-fashioned theory, in favor of which 
much may be said, is, that it is not well to 
facilitate the borrowing of money when the bor- 
rower is poor. The proverb, which, though 
somewhat irreverent, is quite true, might have 
a wider application to advantage. It says that 
"Debt is the devil." In the sense intended, it 
is very desirable that everybody, the rich and 
the poor, should take to heart the lesson which 
is involved in this epigrammatic expression. 
At the same time, as every man of affairs 
knows, it is necessary sometimes that a man 
who has no ready money, but has other prop- 
erty, should be able to borrow ready money on 
the security of that property. It is impossible 
to give any fair reason why this privilege should 
not be open to poor men as it is open to rich 
men, in proportion to the property which they 
have to offer for their security. The poor man 
is as eager to take care of his little as the rich 
man is to take care of his great. Probably it 
will prove that the poor man is more watchful 
over the sum which he has to put at risk than 
is the man who is used to larger advantages. 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 225 

In such a case as we had under our eyes at 
Hampton, there was really no danger that the 
friends and neighbors of Scheffer should be less 
anxious for the security of their little property 
than he was for the security of his. They did 
not give their indorsements without such con- 
sideration as they thought sufficient. It was 
nobody's business what those considerations 
were, — whether they were considerations of 
friendship, gratitude, or some greedy hope that 
in the future he would do the like by them. It 
was nobody's business to inquire as to their 
motives, or as to what the result would be to 
them. So far as the bank officers had any- 
thing to do with the matter, they had to pre- 
serve the property which was intrusted to them, 
and to invest it safely. This they were able to 
do, at some expense of worry and time in the 
account keeping, by as simple an arrangement 
as that which was adopted. 

And it had not proved that the people were 
misled into any extravagant speculations by 
such a convenient arrangement for borrowing 
small sums of money. Up to a certain point, a 
man of good reputation and established position 
could induce fellow-depositors to indorse his 
note so that he could borrow money. But he 
could not do this unless he showed them why 
he wanted the money, and unless they had 



226 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

reason to believe he would be able to meet his 
note and theirs when it became due. The 
friends whom I talked with had satisfied them- 
selves that the system worked well, and ex- 
pressed their surprise that it had not been more 
generally introduced as a part of the practice of 
the smaller savings banks of the country. 

In one of our talks about the bank and its 
results I asked some general questions about 
their charities. 

Mr. Spinner said in reply that if I lived with 
them a little longer I should see that they were 
just like other people, and that they did not 
need any other organization of charity or insti- 
tutions for taking care of the sick or aged than 
other people did. " Because a man works in a 
mill, he is not a different sort of man. Half 
the absurdities which get into print about what 
they call the 'labor problem,' and, worse than 
that, sometimes come into disastrous action, 
spring from this notion, that the world is di- 
vided into men and women and 'operatives.' 
' Operatives ' is a Latin word which has been 
chosen to represent this outside being, who is 
not exactly human. Now if he had three legs, 
or two mouths, or walked on his head, it might 
be all right to classify him so, and to provide 
for him separately. But, — as he is just like 
other men, — as he is like farmers and sailors 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 227 

and lawyers, it seems more possible to treat 
him as other men are treated, and not to un- 
dertake to separate him off into a class, as peo- 
ple call it, with its peculiar institutions, whether 
of charity or government or other arrangement 
of civil order." 

I had learned by this time that this was a 
matter about which Spinner felt rather extrava- 
gantly, and which he discussed rather warmly. 
I had no wish to provoke an angry discussion, 
but I said that I did not mean to offend him. 
"But certainly there are differences," I said, 
" between the hands in the Hampton mills and 
as many farmers in the valley above and the 
valley below. The great difference is that they 
have to work when the mill works. Their hours 
of work have to fit in with the hours when the 
machinery is going. Now the farmer works fif- 
teen hours a day, or five hours a day, or none. 
In this distinction there is a difference, and it is 
as well to acknowledge it." 

By this time Spinner had cooled down, and he 
said he hoped he had not spoken too warmly. 
"But the truth is," said he, "that you have 
stated precisely the distinction, such as it is, 
between us here and other work-people. These 
young men whom you see in my room are not 
chained to this machinery. That one whom I 
call Bob came to me this morning to say that he 



228 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

had engaged for the next summer with the peo- 
ple at Mount Pleasant. He is to be at the head 
of their livery stable there. The man who 
brought me the patterns just now has been out 
in Dakota with his brother, who has a farm 
there. He will go again, one of these days, — 
is, indeed, of rather a restless turn, — but I sup- 
pose that is good for him. And the girls and 
women come and go in the same fashion. 

" Now, to answer your question, as perhaps I 
should have done before, such people, living in 
the same life as the rest of the world, need no 
special system for their old age, or their sick- 
ness, or 'other infirmity.' What is good for 
farmers or lawyers or editors or doctors is good 
for them. But they need nothing more, and they 
take nothing up. When you come to speak of 
Lowell, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, you speak 
of something different from Hampton. But 
you need higher organization of your charities 
there, not because you are dealing with work- 
men, but because you are dealing with large 
cities. As to large cities — well, I am very 
much of Jefferson's notion." 

" What was that ? " I asked. 

" Oh, he said large cities are large sores. I 
think Sallust thought so. To go back. It is 
true, and I am rather proud to say it, that the 
English workingmen, and not the French theo- 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 229 

rists, developed and worked out all the detail of 
the magnificent Friendly Societies, which, under 
one name or another, cover the whole land, and 
make what is technically called ' charity ' the 
less necessary. Providence, prudence, is a great 
deal better than charity. And if a ' Forester,' 
or a 'Druid,' or an ' Odd Fellow' has had at 
once the Christian kindness and the Saxon good 
sense to pay regularly his monthly dues to the 
lodge, or camp, or chapter of the order to which 
he belongs, why, he has saved society no end of 
trouble in bothering about his widow and his 
orphans. I am not a Freemason. But I am 
disposed to think that their arrangements for 
mutual help, or what is really a sickness and 
death insurance, have been very much enlarged 
in the last half-century. However that is, I am 
sure that these other orders, Rechabites, Knights 
of Honor, Odd Fellows, Druids, Foresters, Sons 
of Temperance, and the rest, give to everybody 
opportunities for providing for an evil day, so 
general and so careful that we have no need of 
establishing separate plans of our own, in as 
small a place as Hampton. 

" It all comes to mutual insurance. In fact, 
as you know, some of the associations simply 
take the name of Mutual Insurance Companies. 
Some of them, indeed, do not collect their dues 
until the exact occasion comes when the money 



23O HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

is needed. In a small club of a thousand mem- 
bers you will receive a note which says that our 
brother, Mr. Jones, fell from a roof yesterday, 
or died with typhoid, or was drowned at sea last 
week, and that the secretary knows you will be 
glad to pay two dollars, as you are bound to do, 
by the way, for the fund now due to his widow. 
Well, there is a certain advantage in that plan. 
You see, and cannot help seeing, how good a 
thing you are engaged in. You are sorry for 
the widow ; you are glad you did not fall from 
the roof yourself. And you pay your two dol- 
lars with a sort of personal interest that a man 
does not always feel in paying a money assess- 
ment. But, of course, the principle is the same. 
You are trained to laying up something for an 
evil day ; and, — here is the important thing, — 
you are trained to remember that no misfortune 
comes to you that is not 'common to man,' as 
the Bible says. You are trained to do your 
part, as a Christian man, for all the others. 

" For, no matter what name the thing takes, 
all this mutual provision and care is a part of 
the Christian religion. It is all part of 'The 
Way.' It was set on foot by Jesus Christ, as 
distinctly as if He had dictated the constitution 
of a company to St. Peter. If we were each 
and all so many separate, selfish bodies, we 
should not do such things. It is because we 



THE SAVINGS BANK. 23 I 

are children of God, whom Christ died to save, 
that we do such things, and encourage other 
people to do them. Whether a lodge meeting 
opens with prayer or not, all the same it was 
founded the day Jesus Christ was born, and it 
never would exist were it not for His Gospel." 



CHAPTER XIV. 



WORK AND LABOR. 



I WAS to make a little speech at a picnic of 
a few of the hands one afternoon, and I 
asked Mr. Spinner's advice as to what I should 
say. 

" Pray speak to them as you would speak to 
anybody else," he said, reverting to his old sen- 
sitive feeling of dislike for anything which, in 
our hard-working country, made workmen into a 
" class." "But if you must make distinctions, 
do not call us ' laborers,' and do not talk of the 
'dignity of labor.' " 

"Why not?" said I, dully enough. "Is not 
all that you do intended to give dignity to labor, 
and are you not all laborers ? " 

" No," said Spinner, with an intentional ex- 
pression of indignation. " I am afraid that 
there are one or two laboring men about, dig- 
ging post-holes, or at work in the bottom of the 
flume, but they are all trying to rise from the 
grade of laborers to the grade of workmen. 
Labor is always wearing, fatiguing, repulsive, 
and every man who is a man is always trying to 



WORK AND LABOR. 233 

replace it by some less wearing, less repulsive, 
and less fatiguing process. That is to say, the 
whole of what you call civilization consists in 
substituting Work, which is the conquest of mat- 
ter by spirit, for Labor, in which a man throws 
his own dead weight or muscle against the dead 
weight of the clod he is handling." 

Here was a bit of philology which interested 
me, and I made Spinner follow it out. He said 
that it had been an immense satisfaction to him, 
when the late Dr. Bethune of Brooklyn called his 
attention to the radical distinction between the 
two words. He told me that I should find the 
distinction carefully carried out in the English 
Bible. He said that God is always spoken of as 
working, never as laboring. He said that when 
the righteous die, they cease from their labors, 
but their works follow them, — for that angels 
and archangels are fellow-workers with God 
Himself. Labors, he said, are spoken of in the 
correct English of the Bible as we speak of 
toils, or drudgery, with persecutions and ship- 
wrecks, and other finite necessities of a finite 
world. But Paul and the other saints are al- 
ways hoping to be released from their labors, 
while they, also, like angels and archangels, are 
glad to be fellow-workmen with God. He even 
said that the one place where Paul called him- 
self a fellow-laborer with God, in our Bible, was 



234 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

a slip of the translators, and that it had been 
corrected in the revised version. 

I asked him if Dr. Bethune had ever printed 
his study of this subject. He said he had never 
seen his address in print. But he gave me an 
address of his own, which I am glad to copy here. 
For Spinner's mock rage was really sublime, 
when he ridiculed the stump orators who came 
up to political meetings in October about the 
" dignity of labor." " Probably not one of them 
ever did an honest day's work in his life," Spin- 
ner said, grimly. " If he had, he would talk 
about the dignity of work, and leave labor where 
it belongs." I chaffed Spinner a little, for I 
told him he was himself making the classifica- 
tion against which he warned me, — only he was 
making a class of laborers. 

" I make a class of laborers ! " he cried ; 
" Heaven forbid. No, I am doing all I can to 
reduce the amount of necessary labor, and to sub- 
stitute work for it, — as when the steam derrick 
lifts those stones, which ten years ago would 
have been lifted by the labor of men." And on 
this I went off to prepare myself for the picnic 
by reading the lecture. 

It had been prepared for one of their own ly- 
ceum courses. But I saw by the notes on the 
cover that he had delivered it in a good many 
of the neighboring towns ; and when I read it, 



WORK AND LABOR. 235 

I was glad that it had been favorably received. 
For, as the reader will see, the doctrine of the 
lecture went a good deal beyond a mere specula- 
tion on the use of English words, and involved 
a good many of the principles on which the 
social order of our modern life depends. 

After an introduction half in joke, in which 
he described, with a good deal of humor, the 
political shyster, who appears once a year, pos- 
ing as the " friend of labor," Spinner went into 
the etymology of the words " labor " and " work." 
He cited from Shakespeare and Milton expres- 
sions which showed their use of them. 

That is, he contrasted 

"Painful labors both by sea and land" 

against 

" Come, let us to our holy work again." 

And he took from Milton, 

" Body shall up to spirit work," 
and, 

" Our better part remains to work in close design," 

which he contrasted against the phrase, 

" Those afflictions you now labor under." 

" But this classical use of language, if I may 
so call it, is not yet old-fashioned. Go out on 
the platform of a railroad station, — go forward 
and speak to the engineer. 'We are not on 



236 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

time, Mr. Stevenson. What's the matter?' 'I 
don't just know, sir, but she labors badly on the 
up-grade.' But suppose it is the other way, and 
you say to your Mr. Stevenson, 'You're run- 
ning on time to-night.' 'Ah, yes,' he says, 
with a broad grin ; 'she works well.' That man 
knows the difference between 'labor,' which 
always wears out, — that is what the word means 
in Latin, — and 'work,' which never hurt any- 
body or anything, when it was used in the 
proper way and the proper proportion. They 
would tell you the same thing when the Puritan 
ran her race against the Galatea. If the sailing- 
master were satisfied, he would nod his head, 
and he would say, ' Does she not work well ? ' 
And if he were dissatisfied, — why, if the man 
did not swear, it would be well, but he would be 
sure to say that she ' labored ' with every wave 
of the sea. 

" The Digger Indian, so long as he digs with 
his hands, is a fit type of the laborer. Robinson 
Crusoe, — when he was flung upon the beach, 
without any tools, to work with his bare hands 
and feet, — he was a laborer. He had to bend 
down the trees to make his wigwam. If he was 
heavy enough, — if they broke where he wanted, 
or bent as he chose, — happy for him, — he was 
a successful laborer. But it was his dead weight, 
and the dead pull of his muscles, by which he 



WORK AND LABOR. 237 

succeeded. Robinson Crusoe, when he put a 
lever under a stone, so that with half the labor 
he could do the same work, became a workman. 
Why, as lately as when the dam was built here, 
which holds back the water for our mills, the 
drilling of the holes in the granite for the split- 
ting of the stone was all so much dead labor. 
Ten or twelve good fellows — how I pity them, 
and so do you — stood on the edge of the quarry 
there, with ten or twelve heavy drills, and all 
day long had to thump, thump, thump, as they 
made the long holes into the hard stone for the 
blast of the evening. Did my friend, the Hon- 
orable Slippery Gabbletongue, go up and tell 
them that labor was honorable ? Did he tell them 
so in a practical way, by taking any man's drill 
from him, and sending him off to the next pri- 
mary meeting, while he drilled ? Not he. Mr. 
Gabbletongue was in the drummer's room, up at 
the hotel, preparing his notes on the ' toil-worn 
craftsman.' The ten or twelve good fellows 
thumped away there, till one fine day, a real re- 
former, a man who knew the difference between 
labor and work, looked in upon them. And he 
set up — you have seen it — a little portable 
boiler and engine there. As long as he wanted, 
it drove, not ten drills, but thirty. And one or 
two good fellows tended the drills, in careful and 
delicate work, while the little spitting engine 



238 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

did all the labor. And your friend, Mr. Willing, 
tended the gauges and the escape-valve, and lay 
in the shade and read Henry George, or wrote 
a love-letter. He and his two workmen did 
three times what was done before. And this 
was because they substituted a little intelligent 
work for a great deal of unintelligent labor. 

"Simply, my friends, the advance which the 
world has made in its commerce, its manufac- 
ture, and all its social order, since the year 1775, 
— when Watt and Bolton spoke the word and 
freed the people, — has been in this line of the 
diminution of labor, while true work is substi- 
tuted in its place. I rode into the woods, fifty 
miles up the river, last fall. What did I find 
there ? I found a settler clearing out his farm, 
in a new precinct. Was he swinging the axe, 
as the ' grand old man ' does when he wants to 
take exercise ? He was reading a newspaper. 
He had one of Whittier and Woodruff's little 
horse-powers by the road, — he had his old gray 
nag at work in it ; his boy Tom was training a 
circular saw upon the log in question ; and in a 
tenth part of the time which the laboring man 
would have needed with his axe, the old gray 
had done the business. Labor was relegated to 
the brutes, — where in the end it belongs, — ■ 
and intelligent work was there in its place. 

"But it is not brutes alone, or chiefly, who 



WORK AND LABOR. 239 

are thus drawn into the service of man to take 
his labors for him. There are these giants 
whom man has created, — whom he commands, 
— as Aladdin commanded his slaves. It is a 
slavery, thank God, without a lash or a scar. 
Watt and Bolton first, and since them more 
inventors than can be named, coming down to 
our own Corliss and so many of our American 
inventors, have been calling into being these 
giants, whose bones are of wood and iron and 
brass and steel, and bidding them do our bid- 
ding. And here at the Falls, you have, in the 
same way, with our turbines and our flume, 
compelled the tireless waterfall to take our 
labor, while we work. The workmen I am 
speaking to know what progress has been made 
in the last generation in this direction. But all 
of you may not know that in the manufacture 
of cotton cloth, for instance, thirty hands will 
now do the work which required a hundred 
hands only thirty years ago. I say, do the 
work. In my strict sense of the word, not one 
of those hands is a laborer. He is a skilled 
workman ; and just as the cutler of to-day does 
not drive his own stone, the spinner of to-day 
does not twist his own thread, nor the weaver 
drive his own shuttle. The labor is done for 
him by the waterfall or by the piston. 

" And what has become of the seventy men 



240 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON.* l 

and women set free from the work of spinning 
the thread or weaving the web ? Here is the 
most interesting result of all. What is the new 
variety of industry, — what is the wide range of 
art and manufacture, but the immediate product 
of the hands and the heads of these men and 
women who have new fields of adventure to 
try, who profit by the new inventions, and find 
new work, of grades more and more interesting, 
open before them ? You have the marvels of 
electricity. You have callings created by them. 
You have all the wonderful fertility of fine art. 
Your homes are bright with pictures and books, 
cheaper than ever and better than ever. Trav- 
elling becomes a luxury ; and it is the luxury of 
the poor, where it was the necessity of the rich. 
Gradually but certainly the day's work shortens ; 
yet the world's product enlarges. Prices stead- 
ily fall. Comfort steadily increases. And all 
this is exactly in proportion as, by an intelligent 
invention, we substitute work for labor." 

At this point a double black line was drawn 
across Spinner's manuscript, and the next page 
was left blank. It was clear enough that a 
pause was made here in delivery, — perhaps 
what the old lecturers called an "intermission." 
The address then went on in a somewhat differ- 
ent vein. 

" I hope no man or woman hears me who 



WORK AND LABOR. 24 1 

thinks the distinction I have drawn is a mere 
matter of the dictionary-makers or word-split- 
ters. I hate them and their deeds. I dare not 
try to say how much evil they have done to this 
world, and especially to industry — honest indus- 
try — and to work — honest work. The curse 
— may I say it ? — of the Son of God is upon 
so many of them, where, in that terrible de- 
scription of His, in the shortest words of our 
language, He speaks of those who ' say and do 
not.' I would be dumb rather than come here 
to entertain you with a mere discussion of 
words. 

" No ; I have dwelt on the difference between 
the two words because I want to show the dif- 
ference between two things. There are coun- 
tries and there are times in which there is a 
great deal of labor and very little work. There 
are barbarous countries and barbarous times. 
There are other countries and other times where 
there is a great deal of work and very little 
labor. Such, thank God, is our country and 
this time ; and we call it a civilized country and 
a civilized age simply because there is much 
work and little labor. But, my friends, we do 
not know — we do not begin to know — what 
we mean by that great word 'civilization.' If 
our children know, — and I hope they will, — it 
will be because we are faithful to our part in 



242 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

substituting work for labor. We must do our 
part to have the drudgery done by beasts, by 
water, by steam, by electricity, and by any new 
power which the genius of man, guided by the 
Spirit of God, can tame. To make more places 
for workmen, and to lift more laboring men into 
these places, — this is our duty. 

" We respect labor. Yes ; we respect any- 
thing that is honest. But all the encourage- 
ment we give to labor shall be the encourage- 
ment a man gives to a tired boy on his long 
walk. The walk shall soon be over, and the 
rest from it shall be won. 

" It is our business, first of all, to encourage 
the laboring man, by opening to him every pos- 
sible line of promotion, that he may become a 
workman. Help him to go to the evening 
school. Help him with his books. Encourage 
his children in the same way. Do not ask him 
nor expect him to remain a drudge or a laborer 
long ; but show him that, in a country like ours, 
the lines of promotion are always open. These 
few years of labor are like the voyage of the 
sea-sick passenger, every day of which brings 
him nearer to the promised land. 

" If you will tell him the truth, you can make 
him see this. We have very accurate knowl- 
edge of the proportion of laborers to workmen 
in Northern America. The statistics of Massa- 



WORK AND LABOR. 243 

chusetts are precise. They show us that of 
the working force of that industrious common- 
wealth only nine per cent are 'unskilled la- 
borers.' The other ninety-one per cent are 
workmen. They are conquering matter, not by 
the matter in their bones and blood, but by the 
immortal Spirit which comes from God. Only 
one-eleventh of the force of Massachusetts are 
laboring men and women. Now, suppose Mas- 
sachusetts was an old-fashioned Japan. Suppose 
there was a wall of fire around her, and no one 
could come in. Suppose she said she would 
compel her young men, as they started in life, 
to do this heavy work, — to be her drudges and 
laborers ; and that, when each had done it, she 
would promote them to be workmen, — fellow- 
workers with God Almighty ! They would only 
have to toil in that drudgery four little years or 
less. They would be for that time like the con- 
scripts in a German army. In their young life 
they would so serve the commonwealth that as 
men and women they could rise to higher ser- 
vice as workmen and workwomen, — yes, as the 
directors of the drudges. Any man would say 
that he would buy that emancipation by those 
four years of drudgery, if that was the only 
opening to it. 

" Now these figures for Massachusetts are 
undoubtedly the figures for all the industrial 



244 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

states of America. You have, then, a right to 
say to that good fellow from Italy or from Hun- 
gary who digs a ditch for you to-day, * Look 
aloft, my friend ; look forward cheerfully. At 
the most we only need you a few years in this 
toil. And our schools are open, our library is 
open, our shops are open, that you may leave 
this toil and rise higher.' If the man turns you 
off, — if he had rather drink bad beer and bad 
whiskey all his life, and all his life be a beast, 
a drudge, and a toilsman, — that is his affair. 
But be sure you do your part to lift him higher. 
Make him temperate. Teach him to read. 
Teach him to write. Give him a chance to 
draw. Give him a chance to use his hands. 
Perhaps he can carve ; perhaps he can paint. 
Show him that he has a mind. Show him this 
by showing him that he has a soul. Let his 
soul begin to use his mind and his body, and 
you have made him free indeed. 

" I spoke bitterly of those people who make 
me sick. They are the people who talk all day, 
when they know nothing, and have nothing to 
tell me. They are like the Philadelphia print- 
ing-presses in the Revolution, that clattered all 
day and all night, and printed nothing but sheets 
of Continental money, of which every word was 
a visible lie. When a man like that looks into 
my weaving-room, and sees an intelligent young 



WORK AND LABOR. 245 

lady there overlooking four looms perhaps, gently 
releasing a broken thread, quietly soothing a 
squeaking pivot, — when one of these men calls 
her afterward a person who works with her 
hands, and in condescending contrast speaks of 
himself as a person who works with his brain, 
I want to knock the man down. Brain, indeed ! 
Hand, indeed ! Her work is intellectual work 
far more subtle than his. Let them be judged 
by their fruits. At the end of a year she shows 
so many bales of cloth, or, if you please, so 
many men ' clothed in their right mind,' because 
she gave her intelligence to clothing men. And 
he shows — a ream of paper covered with an 
infinite ocean of nothing. 

" But I do not stop with our duty to educate 
the laborer into a workman. Let us steadily, 
in all lines of our duty, remember that there 
should be no fixed and permanent class of 
laborers. Let us arrange the laws, the customs, 
and habits, as we arrange the education, of the 
community, so that labor may be regarded as 
simply a necessary preliminary to good work ; 
as we inoculate a child, though we make him 
sick for a week, in order that from one disease 
he may be exempt forever. To do this, we 
must highly disregard much that we find written 
in the older books, when the laboring men made 
three-quarters of a community, while now they 



246 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

make only one-eleventh, as I have shown you ; 
and we must determine so to improve industry 
and invention that in twenty years that propor- 
tion shall be reduced still farther, and there 
shall be only five drudges, while there are nine- 
ty-five men and women who have stepped for- 
ward in man's great God-given duty of subduing 
the world. Laws, customs, language, education, 
fashions, — all must contribute to this advance 
and reform. 

" My contribution to it to-night, if I have in 
the least succeeded, has been made in showing 
you the object at which we are aiming. And 
we are to remember that mere drudgery — I had 
almost said, from its nature — degrades the 
drudge, and tends to make him the mere beast 
which he is called. In the mere infancy of 
civilization, the kings of Europe punished men 
by making of them galley-slaves. The severest 
punishment was to make a man completely a 
drudge. All day long, under the lash perhaps, 
he was to pull at that heavy oar. Nay, to dis- 
grace him the more, he was even made to pull 
when his toil was wholly wasted, — when the 
galley was anchored at the pier. The treadmill, 
which I believe we never had in America, but 
which I have myself seen in England, was in 
practice the same thing. It merely took the 
dead weight of the man. He walked up on 



WORK AND LABOR. 247 

that moving stairway, — always stepping up and 
never ascending. Why have these punishments 
been abandoned, except in extreme cases ? Why 
would it be well to abandon them forever ? 
Simply because they ruined the man. You 
treated the man as if he were a beast, and, by 
an infinite law he became a beast. The quality 
of manhood is to look up, and to look forward. 
You took the quality away when you repressed 
it, — when you failed to use it. And just what 
happened to those poor galley-slaves and tread- 
mill men is what is likely to happen to any man 
whom I compel to a life of mere brute toil, 
unless you enlarge him by that noblest word, 
'Friend, go up higher.' 

" You may ask any temperance man, who is 
a real workman in that great cause, whether 
drudgery is not bad for a man's temperance. 
Ask the Red Ribbon men where danger comes. 
They will tell you that it comes when a man's 
physical frame is exhausted by his day's toil, 
and when he has no ambition to supply a higher 
stimulus than that of alcohol. Tired to death, 
with every muscle aching, with no chance of a 
to-morrow any higher than to-day, or that next 
year will be brighter than this year, the poor 
creature goes into the liquor shop as he leaves 
his drudgery. For my part, I do not wonder. 
I can hardly say I blame him. I can say I pity 



248 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

him. And you know what follows. He forgets 
his fatigue, he forgets that he is worn out. 
There has been one cheerful hour after a day 
of wretched toil, — and so, alas ! he comes again 
and again, and at last you hear that the devil 
who tempted him in has kicked the poor brute 
out, because he has nothing to pay to his 
tempter. You began by calling him ' poor man,' 
and then you said 'poor creature,' and then you 
said 'poor brute.' That is, you condemned 
him to the life of a brute, and to a brute's life 
of appetite it reduced him. 

"But, on the other hand, if I wanted to en- 
courage and improve a gang of laboring meri, 
if I found the liquor-dealers had got hold of 
them, and were leading them you know where, I 
would first of all try to make them see that in 
the habit of drink they are selling themselves — 
yes, and the children they love better than them- 
selves — to perpetual slavery. I should show 
them that in a country like this, with open 
lines of promotion, no man is kept digging in 
the mud unless he keeps himself there. I 
should show them that in that slavery they 
are open to the competition of the heaviest 
brute and the strongest, who is too dull to do 
better, — by which I mean, to him, easier. I 
should show them that every starving nation in 
Europe, in Asia, or in Africa, sent over ship- 



WORK AND LABOR. 249 

loads of competitors to lower their wages for 
them. I should show them that while they 
were drinking-men they would never rise a 
hand's breadth above this position of drudg- 
ery ; and the reason I would urge to compel 
them to take the pledge and to keep it would 
be that thus they began their upward step, with 
some purpose and some hope. I should show 
them what we Christians mean when we speak 
of ' The glorious liberty of the sons of God.' 

" I am no preacher, friends, as you know. I 
do not pretend to bring you a sermon. But I 
dare not stop till I have said that you will find 
every word I have said better said in the four 
gospels, and in the letters of that master-work- 
man, as I have heard Mr. Sherlock call him, — 
that master-workman in the craft of tent-mak- 
ing, Paul of Tarsus. That men may come into 
the glorious liberty of the sons of God, the 
Saviour of men begs them to come up higher. 
That they may do so, St. Paul begs them to 
forget the things that are behind, and to reach 
forth to the things that are before. To do this 
they need, first of all, for the glorious renewal 
of the new birth, to master the body, to master 
the mind, by the sway of the Holy Spirit ; and 
this means that they will, step by step and day by 
day, mount from that drudgery in which brute 
force toils with things, up into that higher life in 
which the children of God subdue the world." 



CHAPTER XV. 



COMMUNISM. 



THEY had an old Scotchman in the count- 
ing-room at Hampton, named Dugdale. 
He said he knew nothing about their business, 
for that he was a cotton-bug. But, in truth, he 
had a Scotchman's habit of turning his hand to 
many things ; he had seen many more countries 
than Ulysses ever saw, and many more men ; 
and, having kept his eyes open, he had learned 
something from every man and every country. 

He was so old now that he did not like work 
at the loom, and had even given up the superin- 
tendence of one of the weaving-rooms, where he 
had long been a master. And now he was the 
chief book-keeper of the concern. 

I was interested to find that he knew per- 
sonally Robert Owen, whose experiments at 
New Lanark, in social order, attracted so much 
attention in their time, and were supposed by 
so many intelligent people to carry with them 
the secret of the industries of the future, — to 
exhibit, indeed, the " Kingdom of Heaven " in 
the form which it was to take on earth. 



COMMUNISM. 251 

The Emperor Alexander of Russia visited 
New Lanark ; and Robert Owen went to Elba 
to persuade the exiled Napoleon that here was 
the secret of the future. 

Dugdale had never worked in his mills. He 
was not old enough. But as a baby he had been 
attended to in the "Eccaleobion," which Robert 
Owen provided for the sustenance of all babies 
after they were well hatched. And in later life 
he had made a pilgrimage to New Lanark to 
see the wrecks of that incipient " City of God," 
which had not life enough to live. Very sad it 
was, he said, to find astronomical drawings of 
real value, which had been prepared for popular 
lectures, lying under the foot of man, half-buried 
by the plaster which had fallen from the ceiling 
of the lecture-room. 

Dugdale told me this story one evening, and 
it was a very good text for the consideration of 
dear old Owen's plans, from which we branched 
off — or some of the men present did — into talk 
of Fourier and his Phalanstery, of St. Simon, 
and of some of the later forms of what is called 
Socialism, and of what is called Communism. 

Dugdale said — and I think — that the super- 
ficial writers, particularly the writers for the 
press, in their ignorance of the subjects which 
they pretend to consider, had clouded all discus- 
sions by mixing up Communism with a u, as he 



252 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

said, with Communism with an 0. The old word 
" Communism," with its accent on the first sylla- 
ble, meant one thing. It meant property in com- 
mon, as the Shakers of America hold it to-day, 
or as the Iroquois Indians of New York held it. 
What he called Communism with a u, is the 
notion of the violent French radicals, who want 
to exaggerate local government, the government 
of the Commune, or, as we should say, of the 
township. It is a miserable misfortune for all 
sensible discussion, that the two words .happen 
to be spelled with the same letters. For they 
mean two wholly different things. Yet you can 
hardly find a recent pamphlet on the subject 
which is not obscured by a carelessness about 
two things, which have hardly anything to do 
with each other. 

Dugdale had himself, in earlier life, tried 
some of the socialistic and communistic experi- 
ments. He had even spent part of one winter 
with the Shakers. He had read some of the 
best-digested French plans. I found he knew 
about the Familistere at Guise. And, indeed, 
he went into the philosophy of the system of 
the Iroquois as I had never heard any Ameri- 
can do, even if he were a citizen of the state 
of New York. 

In point of fact, he said, — and I have satisfied 
myself that the remark is true, — property in 



COMMUNISM. 253 

common, if one may use words so contradictory, 
was the beginning of property in more savage 
times, out of which we have gradually emerged, 
and we are to look back into semi-barbarism 
for an illustration of it, instead of looking for- 
ward into a higher civilization. If Mr. Henry 
George really wants to see what happens, when 
all land is owned by the state, let him go to 
the Cherokee Reservation, in the Indian Terri- 
tory, where land is held so now. He can see 
how he likes that. ) It is by gradually working 
upward and outward from this common holding 
of which every country in the world has illus- 
trations in its earlier history, that we have 
come out on the system of to-day. In to-day's 
system a great deal of wealth is still held in 
common. It is " Res Publica," the Common 
Wealth. But for certain things, men and 
women have preferred to have their own 
" proper "-ty. 

Dugdale said that when Robert Owen was 
eighty years old, as eager as ever in his hopes 
for the " Family Unions," as he called his vil- 
lages, he himself asked the old man what 
people would do when the world was all mathe- 
matically adjusted. Dugdale expresses the fear 
that it would be a very stupid world. 

" Do ! " cried the old reformer, with a blaze 
of light as from heaven on his face. " Do ? 



254 H0W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Why, they will travel ! Think of the joy of 
travelling, without expense, without fatigue, 
and without baggage" 

And he explained that the traveller would 
telegraph in advance that he was coming, and 
would find clean clothing laid out for him in 
his bed-room, fitted to his size, — five feet 
seven, or six feet three, as the case might be. 

Dugdale had intimated, in reply, that most 
men had a fancy for wearing their own shirts. 

Really, in this anecdote, the whole principle 
was involved. On the whole, men preferred to 
ozvn their own shirts, their own axes, penknives, 
pens, paper, and so their own houses, oxen, 
horses and barns. John likes to drive a 
fiery trotter, who will go on the road at 2.40. 
William had rather drive a quiet family beast, 
who will not annoy him as they go on the road, 
but will bring him out safely six miles at the 
end of an hour. Because, on the whole, man- 
kind prefers private property in certain things, 
men have private property in certain things. 

But there is other property, which is Common 
Wealth, and the government of the Common 
Wealth holds it and administers it. Un- 
doubtedly it is a subject for discussion and 
experiment how much of such property there 
shall be. Indeed, it may be wise for one com- 
munity to hold certain wealth in common, 



COMMUNISM. 255 

while another community finds it best to hold 
it in severalty. The weakness of Mr. Spencer's 
discussion of this subject, as of many other dis- 
cussions from different English radicals, comes 
on their insisting on classing all property to- 
gether, and protesting against any claims of 
Government. This comes from the dread 
which their fathers were bred in, by the mal- 
administration of a landed aristocracy. 

But, on the whole, it has proved advisable 
that the nation shall own the light-houses. 
Next to these, it has proved advisable that it 
shall own the high-roads, that they shall not 
be owned by private companies. In America 
we are satisfied that the state should own the 
school-houses. Whether it shall own the higher 
schools, — the colleges and universities, — has 
not been decided in an experience. Some states, 
as Michigan and Wisconsin, own the buildings 
and funds of their universities, and administer 
them. In some states, as in Massachusetts and 
Connecticut, they are the property of distinct 
corporations. Most American cities think it 
best to own their own water-works. The reser- 
voirs, the pipes, and all the apparatus, are part 
of the wealth in common belonging to the 
Commonwealth. There seems to be no princi- 
ple which should prevent the city government 
from owning the gas-works and gas-pipes, in 



256 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

the same way. But, on the whole, the present 
habit is to leave this property to special corpora- 
tions. 

In the same way, it would be hard to define 
any principle which should prevent a state from 
owning a railway, — as, indeed, many of the 
European states do, — as most states own the 
ordinary road-way, on which foot-men, horses, 
cattle, and ordinary carriages travel. Whoever 
will take the pains, in his own neighborhood, 
to calculate how much money has been spent 
by the public upon roads, court-houses, school- 
houses, and other public buildings, water-works, 
street-lamps, and other similar conveniences, 
will find very soon, that nearly or quite half the 
property, in that neighborhood is now the Com- 
mon-Wealth. There has been no prejudice 
against that sort of wealth, where it is the 
most convenient form of property. But there 
is other property which, on the whole, in the 
experience of mankind, it has proved best to 
reserve for separate or individual holding. 
This is what we commonly call personal prop- 
erty. Between the two is real estate, which 
is held by the individual as personal property, 
but, at the same time, is held under the emi- 
nent domain of society, which takes it when it 
chooses for a railway, a canal, a reservoir, a 
school-house, a public library, or any other 



COMMUNISM. 257 

purpose where, on the whole, its use is needed 
for or by the Commonwealth. 

Of course it is true, that, as civilization goes 
forward, new experiments may be tried, and new 
adjustments may be found necessary. If a town- 
ship happened to hold a great water-power, it 
might find it desirable to establish an electric 
plant, for light, as a part of the wealth in com- 
mon. Having established it for the highways, it 
would be absurd not to permit its use in separate 
homes, if there were light enough to be used so. 

In just the same way most of our states have 
found it convenient to institute state asylums 
for insanity, for the blind, the deaf, and the 
dumb. Large cities find it convenient to es- 
tablish hospitals for the sick, as a part of their 
wealth in common. There is no principle which 
prevents a small village from doing the same 
thing. But, in a small village, the necessity 
does not press in the same way, and certain in- 
conveniences prevent such an arrangement. In 
either case, however, the institution is founded, 
— or it is not founded, — as the oarticular exi- 
gency may demand. 

Now the difficulty in all the grand paper 
theories, for arranging the common wealth, has 
been that infallibly there has been a vein of 
patronage or condescension visible all along in 
the arrangements of the projector. Robert 



258 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

Owen really thought that he knew how to 
take care of little babies better than their 
mothers did. So he took the babies into a 
common nursery, while the mothers worked at 
spinning-jennies or looms. He went so far as 
to indicate in advance the cut of the dress 
which children were to wear at play. St. Si- 
mon, Fourier, and the whole tribe take just the 
same strain. They talk of "laborers," or the 
"proletariat," or the "working-class," — just as 
you might talk of the mackerel you meant to 
catch, or of the pounds of steam which were to 
drive your piston. What follows ? Why, as soon 
.as Dale Owen carries a colony to New Harmony, 
it goes to pieces on a rebellion about this mat- 
ter of dress. Garfield said : " That all the peo- 
ple are much wiser than any one of the people." 
The people know what they want much better 
than any student of their wants knows. They 
know where the shoe pinches, and what hinge . 
needs oil. 

And the danger and the failure of what are 
called socialistic schemes, — or communistic 
schemes, social unions, phalansteries, or what- 
ever they are called, — spring from their being 
imposed from above below, in this infatuation 
of superiority. It all belongs to the middle 
ages, and to feudalism, where a baron at once 
protected and directed his inferiors. 



COMMUNISM. 259 

But begin at the other end, — begin on the 
Christian principle, where he who is greatest 
among you is your servant, and is only great 
because he serves, — and you will not have any 
danger, and your failure will be easily remedied. 
Let the people associate where they want to 
and need, and they will work out their own 
successes. From their experiments have come 
such triumphs as mutual insurance, as the lim- 
ited liability laws, as co-operative trade, co-oper- 
ative banking, co-operative fishing, co-operative 
house-keeping. If they make a mistake, why, 
they will stop soon enough. They have no 
passion for burning their fingers. And where 
they succeed, they will push forward in the 
same line, and they will find plenty of imita- 
tors. 

It ought not to be necessary to say this at 
any length. Briefly, such success is the Chris- 
tian success, freely promised to those who seek 
first the Kingdom of God, and mean to live 
righteously. He who is greatest among them 
is their servant. And, in the common service, 
the common cause succeeds. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

CONCLUSION. 

IT would not have been difficult to throw this 
account of Hampton into, a more systematic 
form than has been attempted. But it is desira- 
ble that such accounts should be read, as well 
as that they should be written. And I have 
supposed that, by describing the different feat- 
ures of the enterprise, with some reference to 
the different points of view of the persons most 
engaged in them it would be easier to enlist 
readers. 

It is not, however, perhaps, going too much 
into the philosophy of social order, if, in this 
closing chapter, the writer tries to state a few 
of the principles on which the success of such 
an enterprise as that at Hampton is based. 
First of all, it is to be remembered that America 
is, and always was, and always will be, a demo- 
cratic country, — a country of the people, gov- 
erned by the people, for the people, in the 
people's way. It really made no difference 
whether the allegiance of this country were 
given to an English king or to an American 



CONCLUSION. 26l 

constitution. It had been a democratic country 
from the very beginning, and it would not be diffi- 
cult to show that it could not have been anything 
else. By this is meant, that the People, having 
of necessity to take a good deal of the care and 
arrangement of their own lives, took that care 
so as a matter of course, that it was always 
impossible to push or pull them by any wires, 
as if they were puppets, to be directed by a 
superior class. The People had made their own 
roads, had laid out their own towns, had estab- 
lished their own courts, had created their own 
local governments ; and a People which had done 
this was entirely outside of any possible aris- 
tocratic or despotic governments. This is sim- 
ply the explanation of the constitutions of the 
American towns and cities. 

A man has only to see how the roads are 
mended in a country community in America, 
to understand what is meant by the popular 
direction in public affairs. It is no engineer, 
sent down from a central capital, who brings 
with him experts, trained to road-building, and 
what the French would call " proletaries " to 
execute their orders. It is, on the other hand, 
the people of the farms who are themselves to 
ride over the roads, who come, at a day almost 
self-appointed, with their oxen, their shovels, 
their picks, and their hoes, and execute to- 



262 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

gether certain work which the experience of 
the neighborhood shows necessary. There is 
probably some person in nominal authority, 
who is called a "supervisor of the roads," but 
this man acts, and knows he acts, under the 
appointment of the very people whose work he 
is supposed to direct, and the correction of any 
faults of the roads might fairly be said to be 
due to a popular rising in the neighborhood for 
that purpose. 

Upon people so trained and habituated to 
using their own personal judgment in the man- 
agement of their own affairs, there was super- 
imposed, by the changes of life and business, 
what we call the factory system. There has 
never been any trouble in the factory system in 
America, when the conditions were such that 
the instincts of the national popular life could 
be maintained. That is to say, if the people 
themselves who were to do the work, felt that 
they had some discretion in the matter, and 
could bring some of their own intelligence to 
bear on the matter, they have never had any 
difficulty in carrying forward the manufacturing 
process on a large scale, with great precision 
and with important results. But, on the other 
hand, any person who is accustomed to the 
direction of " laborers/' laboring men, or "oper- 
atives," in the countries of Europe, finds, from 



CONCLUSION. 263 

the very beginning, that this direction from 
above working below, autocratic in its charac- 
ter, and savoring rather of Celtic than of Teu- 
tonic life, is met with obstacles at every step. 

Whenever we hear of a difficulty in a mill, or 
a misunderstanding between employers and em- 
ployed, it may be said, almost with certainty, 
that the parties on the one side or the other 
have deviated, perhaps of necessity, from the 
original idea, which is, at bottom, the idea of 
mutual help or co-operation. 

It has been intimated in these pages more 
than once that wherever the American idea is 
permitted to assert itself the results are simple 
and satisfactory, as in the well-known instance 
of the Nantucket whale-fishery, and the fisheries 
for mackerel and cod carried on from both the 
large capes of Massachusetts Bay. It would 
even be fair to take the great military achieve- 
ments of the volunteer armies of the United 
States as an illustration of what is gained when 
the national principle is permitted to assert it- 
self. If, after one of the great conscriptions of 
Europe, it were proposed that the recruits 
should hold an election to choose their captains 
and lieutenants, it may almost be said that 
every commanding officer now on the continent 
of Europe would commit hari-kari, or seek a 
happy release in the face of a proposal which 



264 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

he would consider as, in itself, so fatal to all 
energy and authority. But when the United 
States had occasion to call, not for recruits, but 
for volunteers, and to bring those volunteers 
into the field, the states which were in the 
habit of intrusting to their soldiers the election 
of their own lieutenants and captains found no 
occasion to change their habit ; and the disci- 
pline of that army was maintained with pre- 
cisely the same precision that belongs to what 
we call the regular army of the United States, 
in which no such privilege was ever sought for 
or expected. That is to say, the people of the 
United States understand perfectly well that 
there must be order, there must be command, 
there must be authority. But, on the other 
hand, the people of the United States, from 
the very nature of their being, from the cir- 
cumstances which called them into existence, 
understand that they are the real fountain of 
authority, order, and command, and they like to 
be consulted before authority is asserted. 

All this, it may be said, is merely theoretical. 
Possibly it is so ; but the theory involved is 
based upon national habits which it is impossi- 
ble to pass by without consideration. Now, the 
problem before men who would organize indus- 
try on a large scale, for any specific purpose, 
involves, first of all, the question how the organ- 



CONCLUSION. 265 

ization to be made shall move easily and without 
friction. How shall you enlist the good-will of 
those who must work together in this system ? 
This is really the first question. The first ques- 
tion is not how shall you secure the largest 
market, or how shall you make the most money. 
If the institution is to be a permanent institu- 
tion, the question is, How are you to secure the 
good-will of all hands engaged ? 

It may be granted that the visible result does 
not very much differ, though it has been pro- 
duced in half a dozen different ways. A com- 
pany, for instance, whose troops or whose 
officers have been commissioned by a higher 
authority, would not differ in the aspect of a 
parade from a company of volunteer troops 
whose officers have been, •nominally at least, 
chosen by the privates. But if, in one of these 
two cases, there were harmony and good feeling 
and alacrity among the men, and in the other 
case you found nothing better, perhaps, than 
indifference, or at least willingness to obey, 
there would be a difference in the quality of 
the thing done, which would give the preference 
to one system or the other. 

It is certainly true that in industries not re- 
quiring the co-operation of very large numbers 
of persons, it is easy to obtain that sympathy 
and good-will of all hands which is desired, 



266 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

without any very formal effort for the purpose. 
Most agricultural industries can be carried on 
with that good-natured fellow-feeling which has 
been described as belonging to the race, — the 
willingness, on the one hand, to lend a hand, 
with the expectation, on the other hand, of re- 
spect and confidence. The book in the reader's 
hand is an effort to show that the same sympa- 
thy, mutual regard, and mutual help may be 
obtained in the largest processes of manufac- 
turing, as it is attained on board of a fishing- 
smack or a whaling-ship, or in the work of a 
large farm. 

The principle of co-operation is so essential 
to a]] Christian civilization, and has asserted 
itself with such signal success in many of the 
walks of industry, that the word is now used, 
particularly by careless people, as if it were a 
talisman. The novelist, who has used all the 
pages of his book for the purpose of showing 
how terrible is the conflict between the employ- 
ers and the employed, waves his wand at the 
end with the word "co-operation," and all bad 
dragons are expected to sink into the abyss, and 
good angels to appear in their places. But it is 
perfectly well known that the experiments of 
co-operative industry on a large scale have not 
succeeded so far as to induce their repetition on 
a larger scale. Until this measure of success 



CONCLUSION. 267 

has been attained, it is necessary to study the 
experiments which have been made, to see in 
what is the point of failure. 

As the reader knows, the writer believes that 
the failure is due to the neglect of skilful Man- 
agement. In most co-operative enterprises it 
is taken for granted that if you have a great 
body of privates any fool can command them. 
Such is apt to be the feeling of insurgents when 
they rise to a great but new duty. No fallacy 
is more dangerous, and no statement is more 
false. The success of a business enterprise de- 
pends entirely upon the skill with which it is 
Managed, and upon the faithfulness and con- 
stancy and courage of its managers. Unless 
the necessity for such gifts is recognized at the 
very outset, unless they are rated where they 
belong, as among the rare gifts of men, without 
which success is impossible, the enterprise fails. 
It fails just as certainly as it would fail if it 
had no capital, or as it would fail if the work- 
people all deserted it. To hold in proper re- 
spect those who mediate between the capitalist 
and the workmen, to give to them authority, 
absolute in its place and sufficient for every 
purpose, — this is the first necessity in such en- 
terprises. But it is a necessity which has con- 
stantly been neglected, — one might say, has 
been almost always neglected, in the plans for 



268 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

co-operative industry. There is a general im- 
pression that the managers must be kept under ; 
must be kept in a subordinate position. It is 
thought that they have gained too much in the 
past, and that, for the future, they must be 
paying back the debt which has been contracted 
by their class. And so the enterprise, involving 
vigorous and loyal effort on the part of the 
workingmen, fails, as the army would fail which 
was not led by a skilful and experienced general. 
The distinctive feature, then, in the Hampton 
enterprise, as an enterprise of co-operation, is 
that the Management is recognized as one of 
the three important factors in the business. 
We consider it important that the elements of 
success should be thus classified. The general 
effort in the past has been to give to Capital 
the place of Management, and to place • the 
workman in subordination to the union thus 
formed. The dreams of the future most preva- 
lent have generally given to the workmen the 
Management, and made Capital subordinate to 
the union thus formed. The argument of this 
book is directed to show that Capital has its 
place, that Management has its place, and that 
Work has its place. We believe it will be con- 
venient to divide about equally the profits of 
any enterprise between those who represent 
these three necessary departments of every em 



CONCLUSION. 269 

terprise. We believe that it is as dangerous to 
combine the one of these departments with the 
other as it is in civil government to combine 
the legislative function with the judicial func- 
tion, or the judicial function with that of the 
executive. We believe that the general good 
attained will be in proportion as the three func- 
tions are kept visibly distinct before all men's 
eyes. 

It may very well happen that the workingman 
who is succeeding in life does not choose to con- 
tinue the investment of his property in the sav- 
ings bank, but buys into the stock of the com- 
pany which employs him. So true is it that 
"corporation is co-operation." But no such dis- 
position of a man's property is necessary in the 
Hampton system, as it has been described in 
these pages ; and it has been more convenient, for 
tracing the principle involved, to keep the repre- 
sentatives of Capital, Management, and Industry 
separate from each other. The author has given 
to this book as a second title, " Christianity ap- 
plied to Manufacture." By this he means to inti- 
mate that the plans of the future for large man- 
ufacturing will be akin to the American plan for 
government. They will involve, as an essential 
element, the ability of the people to direct their 
own amusements, their own education, their own 
charities, — in a word, their own social life. As a 



2/0 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

part of this direction, they will have their own 
personal interest, as they now do, indeed, in the 
success of the industries which employ them 
from day to day. It was very natural that a 
few men of property in large towns should con- 
ceive the idea of insuring the ships, the houses, 
or the lives of their persons. But, in the regu- 
lar growth of an American system, this over- 
sight of insurance passes from the hands of the 
few into the hands of the many, and, in the long 
run, under the system of mutual insurance, the 
same person is the insurer and the insured. It 
is by a movement precisely parallel, as the au- 
thor conceives, that the manufacturing of Amer- 
ica has developed on democratic lines. Exactly 
as insurance began when a few rich men met in 
a counting-house and planned an insurance com- 
pany, the large manufactures began when a few 
rich men met and planned a cotton factory or a 
woollen mill. But, by a growth exactly anala- 
gous to the growth of mutual insurance, it will 
probably prove that the persons who have in 
hand the raw materials and work them up will 
be counted in, not simply as passive, but among 
the interested allies in the manufacture to which 
they lend themselves. There will result a sym- 
pathy and common force which is gained when 
a body of people say, " We are going to do this," 
or "We are going to do that," and which cannot 



CONCLUSION. 271 

exist when they say, " He proposes this," or 
"He proposes that." It will be for the next 
generation to indicate the steps by which this 
enlargement of human power will be attained. 
Of those steps the watchword is "Together." 

One has not far to go in the history of Amer- 
ica to find the illustrations of the principle in- 
volved in every stage of our social history. It 
would be fair to say that, from Maine to Florida, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there is not a 
community, large or small, which has been es- 
tablished, in its present condition at the fiat of 
a superior power. The principle of successful 
republican administration has been, on the other 
hand, the movement of the people, and the par- 
ticipation of the people. Louis XIV. could give 
the orders for the foundation of the city of 
Orleans. But, though it held the command of 
the commerce of the Mississippi River, the lit- 
tle port, created to order, was an insignificant 
hamlet, until, in a new dynasty, the People who 
wanted to use the advantages of that position 
swept in upon it, and gave to it a new birth. 
The Middle states can show hundreds of the 
ruins of fanciful colonies, established from above, 
by this or that schemer who meant — as Robert 
Owen did, as St. Simon did — to bring in a new 
kingdom. But such endeavors have regularly 
failed. The unsuccessful colonies established 



272 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

before the time of Jamestown were similar fail- 
ures. The colony of Virginia almost failed, for 
a like reason, and it was not until a popular ele- 
ment was introduced in her affairs that a favor- 
able era of prosperity set in. Exactly the same 
is true of the early history of the Carolinas. 

On the other hand, the states in which emi- 
gration is as free as air, irresistibly, from the 
law of man's nature, one might say, prospered. 
A dozen men, with their families, be it observed, 
found themselves neighbors of each other on 
the same township or grant, or, if they preceded 
any survey, in the same valley. Infallibly they 
consulted together about building the necessary 
roads and bridges. Roads and bridges may be 
said to be the first necessity of organized so- 
ciety. For defence against savages, perhaps 
for carrying the mail, and, before long, for com- 
mon worship, for common education, these men 
must meet together. Every one is interested. 
Every one expresses his interest. Every one 
offers his plan. If a plan is tried and fails, the 
experiment has been on so small a scale that no 
one suffers greatly. If it is tried and succeeds, 
every little community in the neighborhood tries 
the experiment again, and it works its way over 
the land. 

It is in this freedom by which every man acts, 
and is expected to act in social affairs, that the 



CONCLUSION. 273 

mystery and majesty of self-government consist. 
The writers of Europe generally misapprehend 
self-government, and the European advisers of 
America misapprehend it. Self-government does 
not consist in the election, by any "plebiscite" 
or other public act, of the magistrate or emperor 
who is to govern the people. Self-government 
does not appear till the people govern them- 
selves. In homes, in churches, in the meetings 
of school districts or of townships, in the affairs 
of insurance companies or railways, in lodges, 
chapters, commandaries, and posts of charitable 
societies, the people which is used to self-gov- 
ernment carries out its methods of self-govern- 
ment. Among the methods, one is the choice 
of a chief magistrate, to attend to certain 
national affairs, to which kings attend in other 
nations. But this man is not the ruler of the 
nation which chooses him ; on the other hand, 
he is ruled by the nation. 



Any enterprise which is to succeed in Amer- 
ica recognizes as a very important element for 
success this aptness of the people for self-gov- 
ernment and the manifold triumphs which have 
sprung from it. The successful projector leaves 
every agent, as far as possible, to work with his 
own tools, in his own way^to bring his own con- 



274 H0W THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

tribution to the common weal, and is glad to 
accept the intelligent suggestion and co-opera- 
tion of all concerned. He is glad to have public 
opinion and the public sentiment on his side. 
He does not resent advice from one of his 
hands. He is glad if any one of them speaks 
of "our success, our plans, our improvement." 

One of the most intelligent English essayists 
on the modern inventions in mechanical art says 
distinctly that to this ready co-operation of the 
workmen in the American shops is due, in large 
measure, the success of American novelties in 
machinery. He says that a new model intro- 
duced in an American shop challenges the inter- 
est of everybody. Everybody is ready to make a 
suggestion. Everybody wants it to succeed. The 
men set to work upon it, cherish it as if it were 
their own. It has the best chance from the 
beginning. The contrast which he draws, from 
the cool and indifferent reception of a new in- 
vention in an English shop, need not be quoted 
here. It is not flattering. At bottom the com- 
mon feeling of mutual help, trained by all true 
American institutions, is the origin of the cordial 
welcome thus given to the new invention. 

Men like to work together. They have a com- 
mon share, of course, in the common weal, and 
they are glad to have it recognized. 

Now in the village of Hampton this com- 



CONCLUSION. 275 

mon force of the "together" was recognized, 
not simply in political government, but, as the 
reader has seen, in all their affairs. It was not 
necessary to import such an arrangement, or to 
ask any legislator to devise it for them. The 
people drifted into the plan 

"From native impulse, elemental force. 11 
Thus, a detail as much parted from their 
political system as was the management of 
their amusements, took care of itself, as one 
is tempted to say, because it was every man's 
affair. It is not quite just to say that no one 
takes care of that which every one should care 
for. It may be that selfish men hold back, it 
often is so. But let it be proudly recognized, 
that the responsibility of any enterprise is with 
the community and not with the individual, and, 
as in the case of Dick Sheridan's district meet- 
ing, which has been described, the community 
can be made to understand its responsibility. 
When it is made to understand it and to accept 
it, it will go forward much more steadily than 
when it is instructed from above or commanded 
from above. So it proved in the matter of 
amusements. This community provided for 
them lavishly, while it provided for them in- 
telligently. It did so because the leaders of 
opinion trusted the people with a matter which 
specially concerned the people. The people, 



276 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

in consequence, secured amusements which 
amused, and entertainments which entertained. 
At the same time, these were amusements and 
entertainments which did not degrade or con- 
taminate their children. 

The same thing is to be said of the public 
library. One finds, not infrequently, a large 
foundation for a public library, in which the 
annual income is carefully, even wisely, ex- 
pended, but where the real people of the place, 
for whom such costly provision is made, do not 
avail themselves of the books which are at their 
hands. You shall find that in one town a free 
library is diligently and largely used, and, in 
another town, that a better library is hardly 
used at all. You may go into a large and ele- 
gant reading-room of a winter evening, to find 
perhaps one boy, for whom all this lavish prep- 
aration has been made. The other boys and the 
girls, the men and the women, have not accepted 
the " silent friends " who are waiting for them. 
The books stand not read upon the shelves. 

The people of Hampton secured themselves 
from such mortification, because they themselves 
conducted, as they had organized, their library. 
They knew what they wanted, and they bought 
it. It was well for them, perhaps, that they had 
not too large a fund for the purchase of books. 
They counted the dollars which they spent, and 



CONCLUSION. 277 

they spent them well. But nothing was more 
clear than that the library did not surfer because 
it depended upon the public generosity. There 
was nothing, I was told, for which money was 
voted so generously in the annual meeting. 
" After they once tasted blood," Mr. Spinner 
said to me, "they were always ready to vote the 
appropriations." 

The readjustment of the savings bank, which 
has been described, was simply the application 
of the same habit. It came from the magic of 
"together." If there is mutual insurance, why 
not mutual banking ? If a poor man can place 
money on deposit, why may he not draw it, if he 
have good indorsers ? There is no greater mis- 
take than that which supposes that, because a 
man has but little, he will be careless about 
investment. He is more careful than the man 
of millions. And the necessity of keeping well 
what they had earned hardly, made the Hampton 
weavers very cautious before they granted their 
indorsements. 



It has been intimated already, more than once, 
that the success of their movement, in one detail 
or another, sprang from their willingness to sub- 
mit to Christian requisitions, while they claimed 
and expected the advantages promised to the 



278 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

living children of the living God. They were 
willing to do their share in working out their 
own salvation, and they knew that while they 
worked, God worked with them. They were 
not expecting the coming of any kingdom for 
which they had not made some sacrifice them- 
selves. And it was because they trusted the 
God to whom they prayed, that they believed 
that the Christian law of love would be sufficient 
for their enterprise. 

These sketches of the prosperity which fol- 
lows on an attempt to carry out Christian law 
in Christian love, are dedicated to any man and 
woman who seek in the Gospel the direction 
for daily life. It is not pretended that such 
plans will recommend themselves to individuals 
who want to live alone, every man for himself, 
or who seek only the separate indulgences of 
such lonely life. For such men it may be freely 
granted that the cold-blooded maxims of the 
economists are the only maxims. But the suc- 
cess of these maxims in the social history of the 
world has not been so decided that they should 
tempt any one to accept them as a rule of life. 

Such plans for the good of all, as those 
attempted at Hampton, could not have been 
carried out in any heathen civilization. They 
would have failed in ancient Rome ; they would 
have failed in Athens ; they would have failed 



CONCLUSION. 279 

in ancient Jerusalem. They belong only in the 
social system founded by the Saviour of man- 
kind, among men and women who hope to live 
in His Spirit and by His Law. 

Perhaps this has been said often enough, as 
the different chapters have described different 
details. The men and women who embark on 
such plans must understand in their personal 
religious experience, that " if one member surfer 
all the members suffer with it," and that if 
one member is to rejoice all the members will 
rejoice with it. They will remember that the 
Saviour, in His promises for the coming of the 
Kingdom of God, does not address such prom- 
ises to any one lonely follower. He takes it 
for granted, rather, that such lonely follower 
breathes the common life of the church, and 
that its life-blood flows in his veins. It is to 
the "little flock" that he promises the King- 
dom. And to the flock, "if ye seek the King- 
dom of God," He promises the temporal success 
which belongs with the Kingdom, and is the 
reward of such endeavor. It is nowhere prom- 
ised to the Buddhist, satisfied with self-inspec- 
tion ; It is nowhere promised to the hermit, 
parting himself from men. It is promised to 
those who are sons and daughters of God, 
united in one Spirit, who pray with one prayer 
to the Father. 



280 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 

By a movement perfectly steady and assured, 
the Christian church has moved forward on the 
lines thus indicated. 

It abolished human slavery, — first in the 
Roman Empire, and eventually in the Christian 
world. 

It raised the condition of woman, — first to 
the condition she had enjoyed in the Holy 
Land, eventually to a grade where she is the 
recognized equal of man. 

The feudal system, under Christian lead, took 
the place of the social tyranny of Rome, and, 
in its turn, gave way to the social order which 
gives every man and woman equal rights before 
the law. 

As it advances, the Christian Spirit provides 
for the humblest and weakest child of God the 
same privileges for health, for education, for 
development, as are provided for the richest. 

In government, as the Spirit of Christ and 
His Law take more possession of men, the Peo- 
ple rules itself, — it is no longer under the direc- 
tion of any man or any class. The Saviour's 
word is fulfilled, and "he who is greatest among 
you is your servant." The word "democracy" 
means simply the application of Christianity in 
politics. 

It is for the next century and the closing 
years of this to show how these eternal princi- 



CONCLUSION. 28l 

pies of a' divine life are to inspire the great 
commercial movements of modern time. In 
manufacture, in all the applications of science 
for the comfort of mankind, and in that trade 
in which nation exchanges products against 
nation and man against man, the divine law is 
to reign. Such social arrangements also are 
to come into God's Kingdom. Men will not be 
content to live every man for himself, nor to 
die every man for himself. In work, in art, 
in study, in trade, — in all life, indeed, — the 
children of God, called by a Saviour's voice, 
will wish to live in the common cause. They 
will live for the common wealth, — this is the 
modern phrase. They will bear each other's 
burdens, — this is the phrase of Paul. They 
will live in the life of Love. And it will prove 
true, as it was promised, that all things are 
added to the community which thus seeks the 
Kingdom of God and His Righteousness. 



THE END. 



